Playing with Fire: A Story of the Soudan War

Natheless his somewhat gloomy letter to Hester Maule, Malcolm Skene, though feeling to the fullest extent the influence of the presentiment of evil therein referred to, was too...

'These were,' says Colonel Eyre, of the Staffordshire, in his 'Diary,' 'the tribes whose people murdered poor Colonel Stewart. They are entrenched twenty-three miles in front of...

At some little distance from the Nile, but what distance, whether one or ten _shoni_, Skene could not then discover, stood the zereba to which the Sheikh had lately fallen posse...

Tidings had come, as stated, to the zereba of Sheikh Moussa of the deportation of his kinsman Zebehr in a British ship of war as a State prisoner to Gibraltar, and Malcolm Skene...

When she took her seat at table to partake of a meal which was something between a late dinner and an early supper, Roland saw how exquisitely fair Annot Drummond was, as with a...

So while Jack and Maude were absent on their brief honeymoon Roland bade adieu to Hester, his old uncle Sir Harry, and to pleasant Merlwood ere turning his steps to the East.

It was now nearly the close of what is called the first season in that part of the world--that of the inundation of the Nile--which extends from the first of July to the winter...

'In my father's house on sufferance only, it would seem!' was the half-aloud remark muttered through his teeth by Roland, when betimes next morning he was up while the dew was g...

In his anxiety to leave Earlshaugh, Roland writhed under his convalescence, thus retarding in no small degree his complete recovery, and keeping him chained to a sofa in his sit...

To Roland Lindsay there was some new and undefinable attraction towards Annot Drummond, against which, to do him justice, he strove in vain, and his eyes actually fell under the...

So Roland Lindsay was engaged to Annot Drummond. Hester could have no doubt about that when she saw the ring upon her mystic finger; and she supposed rightly that till he could...

On the morning of the 17th of January, early, and without blast of bugle or beat of drum, a frugal breakfast--the last meal that many were to have in this world--was served roun...

Irritated by the event which had struck him down--exasperated by the whole affair, the secret motives for which had gradually become more apparent to him, Elliot tossed on his b...

The First of September came in all that could be wished for the shooting, in which, to Roland's disgust and Elliot's surprise, Hawkey Sharpe took a part, but attired in accurate...

Natheless the fair promises of the faculty, Roland Lindsay seemed to hover between life and death for days. They were a time of watching, hoping, and fearing, and hoping again,...

A letter that had come for him overnight--one from Annot's mother in South Belgravia--he scanned twice hurriedly, and consigned to his pocket. Annot, in that quarter, had made n...

While the column of Brigadier Sir Herbert Stewart was toiling amid thirst and other sufferings across the vast waste of the Bayuda Desert, and gaining the well-fought battles of...

Some days passed on after the little episode at the piano, and the intercourse between the cousins, if tender and alluring, was still somewhat strange, undecided, and doubtful--...

Sorrow is said to make people sometimes, to a certain extent, selfish; thus sorrow in her own little secluded home was, ere long, to render Hester, for a space at least, less th...

The last days of December saw Roland Lindsay with his regiment--the 1st Battalion of the South Staffordshire--of old, the 38th--a corps of the days of Queen Anne--the corps of t...

What did, or what could, Annot mean by this studied duplicity and defiance of propriety? thought Maude; but ere she could reflect much on the subject, or consider how to speak t...

Roland had got a suitable mount from old Buckle and gone for 'a spin,' to leave, if possible, his worries and fidgets behind him, away by Radernie and as far as Carnbee, where t...

Gathering in an excited group at the scene of the catastrophe, the sportsmen, keepers, and beaters found Elliot reclining against, or clinging to the stem of a tree in the old h...

The night, one of the last of autumn, was very cold. She had secured a compartment to herself, fortunately; but there was no kind hand to adjust her rugs, to see that the foot-w...

It was about noon, now, and with a start, roused from his day-dream and half-apathy, Malcolm Skene looked about him and saw that he had then to face one of the most appalling, y...

'The lives of some families,' it is said, 'are exactly like a pool in which--without being exactly stagnant--nothing occurs to ruffle the surface of the water from year's end to...

For two or three days before the all-important First of September, Roland, the old gamekeeper, Gavin Fowler, young Malcolm Skene, and even the pardoned poacher Jamie Spens, had...

The earliest of the guests so roughly referred to by Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, as stated in the preceding chapter, duly arrived in the noon of the following day, and were closely recon...

In this she was mistaken, as Hawkey's sister Deborah, Mrs. Lindsay, was in his confidence in that matter, and quite _au fait_ of its doubtful progress. She did not appear at din...

Though, by her own admission, not entirely ignorant of Annot's secret springs of action, that social buccaneer, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, was exultantly defiant about his victory over,...

Maude, though she knew not then the reason, had seen how Hester Maule, after coming from the conservatory, with a kind of good-night bow to Skene, had abruptly quitted the dance...

On the extreme flank of his party, and rather farther out or off than usual, Roland, intent on following his game, took no heed at first of the swiftly down-coming mist, till it...

The rain and the wind were over; the storm had passed away into the German Sea, as perhaps more than one luckless craft found to its cost between Fife Ness and the shores of Jut...

We must now change the scene to the Soudan--_Beled-es-Soudan_, or 'The Land of the Blacks,' so called by ancient geographers--whither a single flight of imagination will take us...

'Elliot, can this be Jack Elliot?' exclaimed Dick Mostyn as he screwed an eyeglass into his left eye. 'By Jove, he looks as if he had a bad toothache! What's up, Jack--lost your...

It singularly chanced that about an hour before midnight, and during a lull in the storm, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who--as we have said--had been seen hovering about the vicinity of E...

On the night before this brilliant encounter the greatest enthusiasm prevailed in the ranks of General Earle's column at the prospect of a brush with the enemy at last, after an...

His sword and helmet cases, his portmanteau and travelling rugs were duly strapped and placed in the stately old entrance-hall in readiness, as Roland was to be off by an early...

Roland lost no time in telegraphing home for news of the missing ones, but received none; Mr. M'Wadsett was absent from town, so he and Jack Elliot, who was far from recovery ye...

In the pursuit of personal information, which should have been in his possession before, that somewhat too easy-going young soldier, Roland Lindsay, in the course of a day or tw...

And now, a few days subsequently, while idling after dinner over coffee and a cigar, with his pretty cousin and Sir Harry, in the latter's study, a little room set apart by him...

'Instead of talking nonsense here, I really think you should go home, Roland,' said the girl, with a tone of pain and pique at his nonchalant manner; 'home for a time, at least.'

Next morning when Hester, in the most becoming of matutinal costumes, pale rose colour, which so suited her dark hair and complexion, was presiding over the breakfast table, and...

Lunch ended, Roland was lingering rather gloomily over a glass of his father's old favourite Amontillado, which Simon Funnell had disinterred from the cobwebby bins of the cella...

He must have lost his way; but then every foot of the ground was so familiar to him that such seemed impossible; and the idea of an accident did not as yet occur to any one.

The action of one human being on another, by subtle means, it has been said, is as effective as the action of light on the air: that under the influence of Hawkey Sharpe and cer...

Roland found himself somewhat ceremoniously ushered into a drawing-room with which he was familiar, and which was known as the Red Room, where he was left at leisure for a few m...

Repeatedly Jack Elliot thanked Heaven that his comrades in the regiment had not got hold of his wretched story--that he and his young wife had quarrelled--were actually separate...

While Roland's mind was agitated by a nervous dread of how to break to the ambitious little Annot--for ambitious he knew her to be--the real state of his position and his altere...

'As weel try to sup soor dook wi' an elshin as shoot in comfort wi' that coofor waur--that gowk Hawkey Sharpe--so thank gudeness he's no wi' us this day!' snorted old Gavin Fowl...

Annot was certainly curious to know what was passing between the two whom she had seen wandering into the cooler atmosphere of the conservatory; but she could not at the same ti...

It was pretty clear, on the whole, to Hester, that her cousin, Roland Lindsay, thought but little of the past, and perhaps, as a general rule, cared for it even less. While she...

'It cannot be! It cannot have happened--it is too dreadful--too cruel!' she repeated to herself again and again; but could she doubt the tenor of the letter she had seen and rea...

The sportsmen assembled next morning a little later than usual, and after hastily partaking of coffee, were about to set forth after the partridges, with dogs, keepers, and beat...

Though the life of Hester Maule at Merlwood was a somewhat secluded one, as she had no mother to act as chaperone, it was not one of inaction. Her mornings were generally spent...

While Malcolm Skene was counting the days wearily and anxiously, and, in common parlance, 'eating his heart out,' in that distant zereba, near the Third Cataract of the Nile, ti...

Among her letters one morning--though her chief correspondent was her father, the old Indian veteran at Merlwood, whose shaky caligraphy there was no mistaking--there came one w...

When the shooting party, after being somewhat delayed by Skene's unexpected departure, was setting forth, Roland and Elliot, with no small indignation, and confounded by his pro...

The fond white arms of Maude were around Jack, his head was pillowed on her breast; so the young pair were once more together, and she had, of course, installed herself as his n...