"Good gracious!" she said, "in our hurry to get away we have quite forgotten to say good-bye to Doctor Nikola!"
"Do you know," she said, "I had such a curious dream about him last night. I dreamt that I saw him standing in the courtyard of a great building on a mountain-side. He was dressed in a strange sort of yellow gown, not unlike that worn by the Buddhist priests, and was worn almost to a shadow and looked very old. He approached me, and taking my hands, said something that, in the commonplace light of day, doesn't seem to have much sense in it. But I know it affected me very much at the time."
"What was it?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
"It was this," she answered--"'_Remember that I have forgiven; it is for you to forget._' What could he have meant?"
"Since it is only a dream, it is impossible to say," observed my wife, and thus saved me the danger of attempting a solution.
To bring my long narrative to a conclusion I might say that the Duke and Miss Trevor were married last May. They spent their honeymoon yachting to the West Indies. Some one proposed that they should visit Venice; indeed, the Earl of Sellingbourne, who had lately purchased the Palace Revecce, and had furnished it, by the way, from the Tottenham Court Road, placed it at their disposal. From what I have been told I gather that he was somewhat ill-pleased because his offer was not accepted.
When the wind howls round the house at night and the world seems very lonely, I sometimes try to picture a monastery on a mountain-side, and then, in my fancy, I see a yellow-robed, mysterious figure, whose dark, searching eyes look into mine with a light that is no longer of this world. To him I cry--
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A BID FOR FORTUNE; or, Dr. Nikola's Vendetta
IN STRANGE COMPANY: A Story of Chili and the Southern Seas