Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/216

 generally we must say that we don't think "Boy" would have put his hat on—as he is reported to have done—while still in the room with the ladies.

"Boy" passes into Sandhurst, but is expelled therefrom for drunkenness; he gets a clerkship, incurs card debts, alters the amount on a check which Miss Letty has sent him, repents of the fraud, returns the whole amount, with a manly apology, to Miss Letty, enlists, and is killed by the Boers. That, then, is the sad end of "Boy."

In addition to the characters mentioned there are others of subsidiary importance, and there is, threading in and out of the "Boy" episodes, a love-story which ends tragically, at the time, for the Major's niece, though she eventually meets the man Fate has decreed she shall marry, on a South African battle-field.

In no other book has Miss Corelli favored us with so many smile-provoking passages. There is, for instance, a good deal of grim humor about "Rattling Jack"—the salt-dried veteran of whom "Boy" makes a friend when the D'Arcy Muirs move from their London home in Hereford Square to cheaper quarters on the coast.

Rattling Jack doesn't sympathize with the elementary methods of the young student of natural history. He doesn't see why beetles and butterflies