AN ISLAND ROMANCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3755, 2 March 1926, Page 78

AN ISLAND ROMANCE.

"Wheeling Trees.” By Cecil Adair. (Paper, 2a net). London: Stanley Paul and Company. All Cecil Adair’s stories breathe a romantic sentimentalism strikingly in contrast with the methods of treating life most characteristic of modern fiction. The present story is very fairly representative of her qualities as a writer, though' it contains more tragedy and adventure than most of them. Part of the attractiveness of Miss Adair’s fiction consists in her choice of beautiful surroundings for the settings of her stories, and the descriptive passages in which beautiful landscapes, luxuriant vegetation, and atmospheric effects are vividly brought before thci reader’s mental eye. r ihe scenes of the present story are laid in one of the lovely tropical or semitropical islands so often chosen by Miss Adair. To this comes the heroine Barbara, who has been educated in France, and nursed wounded soldiers there during the war, in which she has lost father and brother. On the island she lives with a gentle old French spinster, whose love romance is a minor interest of the story. Here she is told about “Casuarina”—the house of whispering trees. The name Casuarina” in island speech signifies "whispering trees,” and the natives believe that the trees are haunted by the spirits of the dead, who whisper in their leaves all night through. In the secluded house surrounded oy these ghostly trees dwells Captain Vale, guarded by fierce dogs greatly dreaded by the natives, who believe that the mother of these dogs is a “loup-gnrou,” and tell of children seized and devoured by her Captain Vale has come to live as a recluse owing to a haunting memory of the Great War. At her own prayej and for the best of reasons he had taken the life of a girl in a terrible crisis, and now he cannot persuade himself that he was justified. The reader will have no difficulty in devining the development of the story. Enough to say that the conclusion is in accordance with the idealistic optimism characteristic of Miss Cecil Adair’s fiction.