Old, wrinkled, sour-visaged Archie Auchindoir, with keen grey eyes, white hair, and saturnine cast of features, was a strange 'Squire o' the Dames,' or _Escudero_ (as the Spaniards would have it), for a handsome young girl, albeit that she was in the deepest mourning; but no one could be more kind, loving, and reverential, for poor Archie loved the very ground his young mistress trod, and watched over her as a father would have done. And so, with this peculiar attendant, Alison bade adieu to old Rebecca Prune, quitted Chilcote, and, furnished with a letter of introduction from the vicar, set out by second class for London by an early train on her melancholy pilgrimage; and many a poor girl has thus set forth to earn her bread without the honest consolation and support of a vassal so tender and true. Piqued as she was now beginning to be by the knowledge that Bevil Goring was in London, when he might have been seeking her, especially amid her sorrow, in the country, she was not without hopes--but oh, how slender they were!--of perhaps hearing something of him in that vast human wilderness towards which she was being hurried. CHAPTER XIII. EVENTS PROGRESS. The whole expedition was now returning from the Gold Coast, save those who had found their graves in the wilderness on the advance to Coomassie, and in the fighting incident thereto. Among those returning were the two hundred and sixty-eight wounded officers and men. The number of deaths in proportion was small as compared with those in recent European conflicts--a fact explainable by the arms and ammunition used by the Ashantees; first, their old-fashioned firelocks and use--not of bullets, but slugs, projectiles which soon lost their velocity after discharge, and were easily stopped after penetrating the body, the stronger bones of which they were incapable of breaking; and lastly, by the total absence of artillery. The telegraphic wire made people at home aware that many of the Rifle Brigade had died on the voyage homeward between the Gold Coast and Madeira; that the Welsh Fusiliers had only twenty men on their sick-list; and the hardy Highlanders very few, though they had to regret the death by wounds of their major, William Baird, who had served with them for twenty years, and been at the siege and fall of Sebastopol. It was known in England that many of the sick and wounded were to remain in the hospital ships, _Victor Emmanuel_ and _Simoom_, or were landed at Ascension and the Cape de Verde Isles for medical treatment; but, as no officer of the Rifles was recorded as among these, Laura with her daughter, escorted by Goring, had betaken herself to the port which is the great headquarters of the British navy, to behold the arrival of the victorious troops from Ashantee, and for whom a great ovation was prepared.