BRILLIANT NEW STORY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13455, 6 April 1907, Page 6

BRILLIANT NEW STORY.

•'THE AVENGER." BY E. PHILLIP OPPF.NHEIM.

Readers will find in to-day's supplement the opening instalment of a stirring novel bv E. Phillips Oppenheim, one of the most popular of modern authors. "The Avenger," Mr. Oppenheiin's latest work, is certain to command a wide circle of readers in New Zealand and elsewhere. The proprietors of the New Zealand Herald have secured the serial rights of the story, prior to publication in book form, and it is now being published for the first time.

The story opens in London with the invasion of Herbert Wrayson's apartment bv a beautiful woman. Wravson finds her examining his desk. She refuses to state the object of her visit further than to declare that she thought she was in the rooms of Mr. Morris Barnes, which are located overhead. Finally she escapes, and some hours afterwards Herbert Wravson encounters her descending the staircase from Morris Barnes' flat, whose rooms it had been her intention to visit. She is in an exhausted condition, and after giving her some brandy he escorts her to the entrance, where she shows signs of terror of a man in a hansom drawn up before the door. Wrayson naturally suggests that he is either drunk or asleep. "Or dead!" she whispers, "Go and see." And she flits down the street before Wrayson has had time to recover his wits. A visit to the call proves her words only too true. Wrayson rouses the cabman, who drives at once to the police station. Morris Barnes is dead, murdered, but his affairs are very much alive, and to the fore throughout the story. "The evil that men do lives after them," says Shakespere, and here the truth of this statement is demonstrated. The happiness of sever a' lives and the destiny of a Queen hinge on the affairs of this tyid, dead man. A certain Colonel Fitzmaurice, a man whom everyone instinctively likes and trusts, figure? much in the narrative. Full of kindly feeling and abounding in generosity, he is a friend to whom one would turn in trouble, and is, in an all round sense, a jolly good fellow. Perhaps one of the most loathsome villains a fiction writer could draw is portrayed for us in the person o c Mr. Sidney Barnes, Morris Barnes' brother. At the outset our sympathy involuntarily extends to him, for he certainly has been unkindly treated by Dame Fortune, but he himself effectually obliterates any sentiment of that kind by his inordinate greed of gold, his utter lack of any moral feeling, and his absolute selfishness. Surely as a villain he. outrivals his brother! There is only one tribute that wo can pay the dead man, and we hasten to pay it. It is his poor little unsophisticated wife down in the country, to whom her dear Augustus has been as a god, to be loved and adored, although he gave her a false name. Yet lie loved her and entrusted her with that which cost him his life. The injured Queen, the faithful baroness, the equally loyal Louise— who raided the apartments of Morris Barnes, and found not what she sought, although she did find what she looked not for, her destiny, in the shape of Herbert Wrayson—the jovial colonel, that reptile, Sidney Barnes, all are equally well drawn and equally interesting. But the denouement? That is the surprise the author has in store for his readers, probably none of whom will elucidate the mystery until the author lifts the veil, and then, the surprise! The question throughout the story is, Who killed Morris Barnes? Th opening chap ters are given to-day, and the story wi'i be continued daily in the columns of th/ New Zealand Herai.d till its conclusion.