New-York tribune., 1922-07-30

the elder mans practice, instead Of
studying further for the more lucrativ
and distinguished position OF q spe-
ciaist. This out of gratitude for his
Uncle David, who has taken the place
of father to him. Dicks father, it
appears, Is dead, having died ten years
before on lonely ranch in Colorado.
The young doctor has just returned
with honor from serving in the medical
corps in the war. He is.in love with u
delightful girl, who loves him in return.
His future life seems happily fixed and
settled. And then into this peaceful
scene drifts a small rumor, no more
than the gossip Of an idle woman, who
has just returned from visit to the
West. She says that while in Colorado
she met several people who had known
David Livingstone's brother, Henry.
Dicks father--and none of those old ac-
quaintanccs ever heard that Henry Liv-
ingstone had son. Then who is Dick
Livingstone?
The question is like the whisper
that legend says may start an ava
lanche. An unknown past crashes down
on the young doctor-unknown to him
self, as we'll as his sweetheart and
friends. For he could not remember
the first twenty years Of his life With
in month the memories of his youth,
dormant for ten years, come back to
him, wiping out the intervening time;
and he finds himself hunted man,
heelng from charge of murder, undar
name he had utterly forgotten,
burdened with remorse and tortured
by a desperate infatuation for woman
whom he must never see again and
whose life he believes he has spoiled.
His uncle, his hame, his betrothed, all
the clean and honorable years Of labor
and achievement, are clean gone from
his consciousness, flooded away in this
uprush of the submerged past. Even
when he is told of them he can make
nothing of the story, nor feel any
thing but a dull impersonal regret for
those other broken lives added to his
account. He is not DR.. Richard Liv-
ingstone; he is Judson Clark, the
wastrel heir of millionaire, who once
made New York "sit up" by his spec
tacular wooing Of beautiful actress,
Beverly Carlysle, and later was
blazoned in screaming headlines as
the killer of Beverly's husband.
How this could have come about in
the first place, and how these two
diametrically opposed characters are
finally fused into one. constitute the
story. 1t takes all Mrs. Rinehart's ex-
traordlnary natural facility and ac-
quired skill to do it, but in the end
, she leaves not single loose thread
The action is SO smooth and continu-
! GUS that nowhere is credibility strained
to the breaking point; it is only by
pausing to consider that one sees it is
,, intr!ncelly impossible; that the long
arm Of coincidence and the main
strength Of the author have both been
employed to hoist the plot over it's
difficulties. Just as an achievement, it
calls to mind the Song of the Banjo:
"And when the thing that couldn't has
occurred, give me time to change my
leg and go again"
There you are; Mrs. Rinehart ma
turally writes the kind of story that
the majority of people naturally like
and she does it great deal better
than any one else.
Possibly humor would be out of
place in tale of such tragic incident;
but one misses what Mrs. Rinehart
easily supplies in other stories. (Thus
much just to be CRITICALLY