https://books.google.com/books?id=94OTUUmRnVAC, The Forlorn Hope a Novel, (Volume 877, Vol. 1, in, Collection of British Authors, Volume 878) COLLECTION. OF BRITISH AUTHORS. VOL. 877. ---------------- THE FORLORN HOPE BY EDMUND YATES. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. THE FORLORN HOPE. A NOVEL. BY EDMUND YATES, AUTHOR OF "LAND AT LAST," "BROKEN TO HARNESS," ETC. _COPYRIGHT EDITION_. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LEIPZIG BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ. 1867. _The Right of Translation is reserved_. TO CHARLES FECHTER. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. CHAPTER I. "Sound the Alarm." II. Master and Pupil. III. Watching and Waiting. IV. Mrs. Wilmot. V. A Resolve, and its Results. VI. At Kilsyth. VII. Brooding. VIII. Kith and Kin. IX. Ronald. X. Cross-examination. XI. Irreparable. XII. The Leaden Seal. XIII. A Turn of the Screw. XIV. His grateful Patient. XV. Family Relations. XVI. Giving up. XVII. Face to Face. THE FORLORN HOPE. CHAPTER I. "Sound an Alarm." The half-hour dressing-bell rung out as Sir Duncan Forbes jumped from the hired carriage which had borne him the last stage of his journey to Kilsyth, and immediately followed his servant, who had put in a pantomimically abrupt appearance at the carriage-door, to his room. The steaming horses shook their sides, and rattled their harness dismally, in the dreary autumnal evening; but a host of gillies and understrappers had hurried out at the noise of the approaching wheels, and so quickly despoiled the carriage of its luggage, that within a very few minutes its driver--comforted by something over his fare, in addition to a stiff glass of the incomparable Kilsyth whisky--was slowly wending his way back, over a road which to any one but a Highlander would have seemed impassable in the fog that had begun to cloud the neighbouring mountains in an almost impenetrable shroud of misty gray. From the cold, chilly, damp mountain air, from the long solitary ride, for the last twenty miles of which he had not met a human creature, to the airy bedroom with its French paper, the bright wood-fire burning on its hearth, the wax candles on the dressing-table, the drawn chintz curtains, the neat writing-table, the little shelf of prettily-bound well-chosen books, was a transition indeed for Duncan Forbes. One glance around sufficed to show him all these things, and to show him in addition the steaming bath, the warmed linen, the other various arrangements for his comfort which the forethought of Dixon his servant had prepared for him. He was used to luxuries, and thoroughly accustomed to rough it; he was not an impressionable young man; but there are times, even if we be only eight-and-twenty, good-looking, and in the Household Brigade, when we feel a kind of sympathy with the working-man who declared that "life was not all beer and skittles," and are disposed to look rather more