Alice Muriel Williamson

Beautiful young orphan, Consuelo Brand, is rescued from dreary governessing by fashionable and eccentric Lady Sophie de Gretton who means to take her up for a time and work some Cinderella magic. She falls in love with wealthy Sir George Seaforth, who has a secret, and is followed by a sinister heterochromatic solicitor and a socially powerful mother-daughter duo. Who is Consuelo, really, and why do they wish her harm?

[from review in the the Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington) Sun, Sep 8, 1907] Hugh Cameron, a young Englishman of good birth, but bad income, takes all the money he has in the world, a small legacy from an uncle, and builds himself a motor car, which, if successful, will make his fortune. For it has an aeroplane attachment, which makes it as near a bird as anything built to stay on the ground can be. Champion it is baptized and a champion it proves, both in speed and heart, for the automobile itself tells the story of its own and its master's woes, with all the devoted blindness of a faithful servant for a kind master.

The car is finished, the secret well kept, the fortune of the master is in the hands of the machine. Champion learns from conversation carried on around him many facts concerning his mater's past and his hopes for the future. He has been entered for the great Vandervoorst cup race for inventors. His great and only rival is a certain Gilbert Barr-Simons, an unprincipled millionaire, also with a car of his own invention, yet lacking the one peculiar touch which gives Champion the great advantage.

But a French chauffeur has been helping Hugh and is bribed by the rival to discover all the secret, betray it and his employer. Till the day of the great race, he has accomplished nothing. The 100 thrills that the description of that event and its outcome creates must be read in the author's own words. It makes a capital story, full of many sensations -- suspense, hope, fear, and indignation -- for the author has managed to make the car so human that the keenest sympathy is aroused and sustained from the very first page.

After the race various adventures befall the poor car and it seems many times as if it must become a back number and belong only to the junk heap. Repainted, with a new outside, separated from its beloved master, ill-treated and in a foreign land, its fortunes look black, indeed, when one day it is bought by an American, whose daughter has ranked next to his master in the heart of the car, and is taken to England. There along every road its engines sing "The March of the Cameron Men" until a certain bright day comes and fortune smiles on love of both girl and car. The book will make one of the best hammock novels of the season.