It was three weeks after, that Sir Bale, sitting up in his bed, very pale and wan, with his silk night-cap nodding on one side, and his thin hand extended on the coverlet, where the doctor had been feeling his pulse, in his darkened room, related all the wonders of this day to Doctor Torvey.  The doctor had attended him through a fever which followed immediately upon his visit to Cloostedd.

“And, my dear sir, by Jupiter, can you really believe all that delirium to be sober fact?” said the doctor, sitting by the bedside, and actually laughing.

“I can’t help believing it, because I can’t distinguish in any way between all that and everything else that actually happened, and which I must believe.  And, except that this is more wonderful, I can find no reason to reject it, that does not as well apply to all the rest.”

“Come, come, my dear sir, this will never do—­nothing is more common.  These illusions accompanying fever frequently antedate the attack, and the man is actually raving before he knows he is ill.”

“But what do you make of that bag of gold?”

“Some one has lent it.  You had better ask all about it of Feltram when you can see him; for in speaking to me he seemed to know all about it, and certainly did not seem to think the matter at all out of the commonplace.  It is just like that fisherman’s story, about the hand that drew Feltram into the water on the night that he was nearly drowned.  Every one can see what that was.  Why of course it was simply the reflection of his own hand in the water, in that vivid lightning.  When you have been out a little and have gained strength you will shake off these dreams.”

“I should not wonder,” said Sir Bale.

It is not to be supposed that Sir Bale reported all that was in his memory respecting his strange vision, if such it was, at Cloostedd.  He made a selection of the incidents, and threw over the whole adventure an entirely accidental character, and described the money which the old man had thrown to him as amounting to a purse of five guineas, and mentioned nothing of the passages which bore on the coming race.

Good Doctor Torvey, therefore, reported only that Sir Bale’s delirium had left two or three illusions sticking in his memory.

But if they were illusions, they survived the event of his recovery, and remained impressed on his memory with the sharpness of very recent and accurately observed fact.

He was resolved on going to the races of Rindermere, where, having in his possession so weighty a guarantee as the leather purse, he was determined to stake it all boldly on Rainbow—­against which horse he was glad to hear there were very heavy odds.

The race came off.  One horse was scratched, another bolted, the rider of a third turned out to have lost a buckle and three half-pence and so was an ounce and a half under weight, a fourth knocked down the post near Rinderness churchyard, and was held to have done it with his left instead of his right knee, and so had run at the wrong side.  The result was that Rainbow came in first, and I should be afraid to say how much Sir Bale won.  It was a sum that paid off a heavy debt, and left his affairs in a much more manageable state.