The Project Gutenberg EBook of Captain Dieppe, by Anthony Hope

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Title: Captain Dieppe

Author: Anthony Hope

Release Date: May 23, 2009 [EBook #28935]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAIN DIEPPE ***

Produced by Al Haines

Captain Dieppe

By

Anthony Hope

Author of "The Prisoner of Zenda," "Rupert of Hentzau," etc., etc.

Doubleday, Page & Co.

New York

1906

Copyright, 1899, by ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS.

Copyright, 1899, by CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.

Copyright, 1900, by ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. THE HOUSE ON THE BLUFF
II. THE MAN BY THE STREAM
III. THE LADY IN THE GARDEN
IV. THE INN IN THE VILLAGE
V. THE RENDEZVOUS BY THE CROSS
VI. THE HUT IN THE HOLLOW
VII. THE FLOOD ON THE RIVER
VIII. THE CARRIAGE AT THE FORD
IX. THE STRAW IN THE CORNER
X. THE JOURNEY TO ROME
XI. THE LUCK OF THE CAPTAIN

Captain Dieppe

CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE ON THE BLUFF

To the eye of an onlooker Captain Dieppe's circumstances afforded high
spirits no opportunity, and made ordinary cheerfulness a virtue which a
stoic would not have disdained to own. Fresh from the failure of
important plans; if not exactly a fugitive, still a man to whom
recognition would be inconvenient and perhaps dangerous; with fifty
francs in his pocket, and his spare wardrobe in a knapsack on his back;
without immediate prospect of future employment or a replenishment of
his purse; yet by no means in his first youth or of an age when men
love to begin the world utterly afresh; in few words, with none of
those inner comforts of the mind which make external hardships no more
than a pleasurable contrast, he marched up a long steep hill in the
growing dusk of a stormy evening, his best hope to find, before he was
soaked to the skin, some poor inn or poorer cottage where he might get
food and beg shelter from the severity of the wind and rain that swept
across the high ground and swooped down on the deep valleys, seeming to
assail with a peculiar, conscious malice the human figure which faced
them with unflinching front an