Page:The Prisoner of Zenda.djvu/327

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PRESENT, PAST—AND FUTURE?
303

"I don't think it's so much like me as the photograph," said I boldly. "But anyhow, Bob, I won't go to Strelsau."

"No, don't go to Strelsau, Rudolf," said he.

And whether he suspects anything, or has a glimmer of the truth, I do not know. If he has he keeps it to himself, and he and I never refer to it. And we let Sir Jacob Borrodaile find another attaché.

Since all these events whose history I have set down happened I have lived a very quiet life at a small house which I have taken in the country. The ordinary ambitions and aims of men in my position seem to me dull and unattractive. I have little fancy for the whirl of society, and none for the jostle of politics. Lady Burlesdon utterly despairs of me; my neighbors think me an indolent, dreamy, unsociable fellow. Yet I am a young man; and sometimes I have a fancy—the superstitious would call it a presentiment—that my part in life is not yet altogether played; that, somehow and some day, I shall mix again in great affairs, I shall again spin policies in a busy brain, match my wits against