Hugh Walpole

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair Hugh Walpole

This is Hugh Walpole's most venturesome, most exciting romance. Down to the town of Treliss on the Cornish coast came Harkness, a your American of Puritan cutlture and ideal, there to find the adventure and the love of his life, and pain the like of which he had never dreamed. Here the skill of Walpole turns to a tale of daring, a new expansion of his genius. The power of Fortitude, the bold characterizations of The Cathedral, the wistful quality of The Old Ladies, are combined here with an episode entirely astonishing, and worked out in an atmosphere of sharp suspense. The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket-handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple- pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away. For Harkness had committed the folly of having two books open on his knee-a peck at one, a peck at another, a long, eager glance through the window at the summer scene, but above all a sensuous state of slumber hovering in the hot scented afternoon air just above him, waiting to pounce . . . to pounce . . .