Neva Wynde had retired to her bed, as will be remembered, upon the marriage night of Lady Wynde and Craven Black, her thoughts all of her father and of his tragic fate in India. All day long she had thought of him with tender yearning, pity and regret, recalling to mind his goodness, nobleness, and grandeur of soul; and when night came, and she lay in her bed with the noise of revellers in the drawing-rooms and on the lawn coming faintly to her ears, she had sobbed aloud at the thought that her father had been so soon forgotten, and that his friends and tenantry were now making merry over the marriage of his widow to a man unworthy to cross the threshold of Hawkhurst. And thus sobbing and thinking, she had slept, and in her sleep had dreamed that her father still lived, and that she saw him standing at the door of a hut among the far-off Indian hills, and that she heard his voice calling “Octavia! Neva!” And thus dreaming, she had awakened with a cry of terror, to ask of herself if it was only a dream. It was not strange that she had thus dreamed, since all the day and all the evening her mind had been fixed upon her father. It would have been strange if she had not dreamed of him. Her dream had had the clearness of a vision, but Neva was not romantic, and although she slept no more that night, but walked her floor with noiseless steps and wildly questioning eyes, yet she convinced herself long before the morning that she had been the victim of her excited imagination, and that her dream was “only a dream.” But was it so? There is a philosophy in dreams which not the wisest of us can fathom. And although the cause of Neva’s dream can be simply and naturally explained as the result of her agitated thoughts of her father, yet might one not also think, with less of this world’s wisdom, perhaps, and more of tenderness, that the girl’s guardian angel had placed that picture before her in her sleep, and so made recompense, in the joy of her dream, for her day of anguish and unrest? Be this as it may, our story has to deal with actual facts, and has now to take a startling turn, perhaps not anticipated by the reader. It was about one o’clock of the morning when Neva awakened from her dream. It was then about seven o’clock--there being six hours difference in time--in India. Among the cool shadows of the glorious Himalayas are many country seats, or “bungalows,” occupied at certain seasons by exhausted English merchants from Calcutta, with their families, by army officers, and by others of foreign birth, enervated or rendered sickly by the scorching heats of the sea-coast or more level regions. They find “among the hills” the fresh air, and consequent health, for which otherwise they would have to undertake, at all inconvenience and expense, a voyage home to England or Holland.