AustLit

'Heirs in Exile is a pleasant and serious-minded narrative, with a Roman Catholic background. Stephen's mother died when he was a baby, but the father brought him up in the faith, although himself falling away from it owing to love of Mammon. Also the father married again, and had a good-for-nothing son, who raced and gambled, and was called Cecil. Inevitably [Cecil] got into deep water, and Stephen gave him a cheque for nine pounds he had just received from his father to pull him out. Cecil promptly changed it to nine hundred. The father was furious, but just, and told Stephen he would reinstate him as his heir when he had earned a thousand pounds by his own labour in the works. Stephen, who is rather an unnatural modern edition of a medieval saint, goes off without saying a word. He lives in cheap lodgings, and befriends a little boy named Peter. Of course, after a long time, he visited Cecil unmasked, and virtue is rewarded'. Source: 'Recent Fiction', The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 January, 1911.