"A Lover Needs a Confidant"

FARTHING HALL--Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestley--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Mark French, youthful painter, Robert Newlands, less youthful Oxford Don, were both conducting parlous affairs of the heart; and had it not been for their eighteenth century habit of writing each to the other as confidant, neither affair would have turned out so satisfactorily. Into the Lake Country Mark pursued his love-at-first-sight, a charming bit of femininity out of Jane Austen, or--remembering her ferocious father and mysterious exile at Farthing Hall--Jane Eyre. Mark had no sooner wrung from her a timid confession of love than she dismissed him, insisting that her duty lay with the ferocious parent.

Distrait, Mark appealed to his friend, but Robert's letters brought no solace--only the melancholy news that his own wife had left him, because forsooth he had been rude to an old hag of a spiritualist.

A small coincidence, deftly nurtured, came to the lovers' aid. The hag fell in love with the ferocious parent, the runaway wife made it up with her Don, the timid heroine melted into the arms of her rescuer, and they all lived happily ever afterward.

W'hether the romantic youth's letters are written by Mr. Walpole, and those of the gently cynical forty-year-old by Mr. Priestley, is not vouchsafed; but the guess is no great hazard. The combination is pleasant narrative, happy and inconsequential.