Before [Kennet discovers the swindle that is to change several peoples' lives and lead Kennet himself to his death in "Like Men Betrayed"], Mr. Mortimer has introduced us to a chain-stitched cross-section of contemporary England, embroidered with a score of richly colored and contrasting characters, kind, hateful and indifferent, greedy and generous, fantastic and familiar. He has led us through dingy London boarding-houses, cozy clubrooms, solid, middle-class homes and "sad pubs that smell of the Middle Ages." He has given us a glimpse of a bleak, remote village in the shires, where men ride to hounds three times a week while their wives "try to light, with blue fingers, paraffin lamps in stone-flagged kitchens."

But, since he is a brooding philosopher as well as a magnetic story-teller, the author never for a moment lets us lose sight of Kennet and all he symbolizes as he moves, almost willingly, to his doom. A passive, sensitive, essentially lonely man, incapable of a mean act, Kennet felt that he had failed in his responsibility to the war-shocked Kit. "Had he not known himself and his limitations so well, he might have succeeded in knowing Kit better. He had been content, perhaps, to admit that the generation which opposed him baffled him—and, when the chance of resignation came, he almost welcomed it."

Perhaps the author only meant to say that Kennet's death redressed the balance—giving his son a sense of destiny.