TOMORROW'S RAINBOW

Hylton brings a young Irish working girl to her home territory--the north of 19th-century England, the same setting she used in The Hills are Eternal, The Whispering Glade, etc. This time, however, the result is lackluster. Kathleen O'Donovan is the red-haired colleen's name--or Katie to the kindly aunt and uncle who take her in when her dad dies back in County Donegal and the O'Donovans disperse. Soon she's in service at Heatherlea house on Tremayne Hill, where a clutch of cotton-mill barons and their families party and take tea while Katie watches from the pantry. Despite Cook's warnings, she falls for a Heatherlea heir, Jeffrey Carsdale, who leads her on up on the fells. She narrowly avoids compromising herself with him by marrying Liam Clancy, a Manchester builder, though she carries a torch for the Tremayne Hill scion--until a dashing Canadian named Nicholas Yale woos her while on vacation at Lake Como. Meanwhile, her husband turns brutal and carries on with his secretary; Katie bears Nicholas' son, though she passes him off as Liam's; and her daughter, Marisa, has her head turned by bad penny Jeffrey Carsdale--a relationship Katie summarily stops. When Liam dies and Marisa vows to hate her mother until her dying day, Katie prepares herself for a lonely middle age. But then Nicholas shows up to assure her, as her father once said, that ""there'll be another [rainbow] tommorrow. . ."" Soapier, more predictable and less compact than this writer's past efforts, with a passel of faceless men queuing up for the heroine's attentions. Not Hylton's best.