ring.

"What on earth did you do it for?" I asked within.

"It was the only solution," he answered, handing me the cigarettes. "I
saw it the moment I got outside."

"I don't see it yet."

"Why should a burglar call an innocent gentleman away from home?"

"That's what we couldn't make out."

"I tell you I got it directly I had left you. He called you away in
order to burgle you too, of course!"

And Raffles stood smiling upon me in all his incomparable radiance and
audacity.

"But why me?" I asked. "Why on earth should he burgle me?"

"My dear Bunny, we must leave something to the imagination of the
police. But we will assist them to a fact or two in due season. It was
the dead of night when Maguire first took us to his house; it was at
the Imperial Boxing Club we met him; and you meet queer fish at the
Imperial Boxing Club. You may remember that he telephoned to his man
to prepare supper for us, and that you and he discussed telephones and
treasure as we marched through the midnight streets. He was certainly
bucking about his trophies, and for the sake of the argument you will
be good enough to admit that you probably bucked about yours. What
happens? You are overheard; you are followed; you are worked into the
same scheme, and robbed on the same night."

"And you really think this will meet the case?"

"I am quite certain of it, Bunny, so far as it rests wit us to meet the
case at all."

"Then give me another cigarette, my dear fellow, and let me push on to
Scotland Yard."

Raffles held up both hands in admiring horror. "Scotland Yard!"

"To give a false description of what you took from that drawer in my
wardrobe."

"A false description! Bunny, you have no more to learn from me. Time
was when I wouldn't have let you go there without me to retrieve a lost
umbrella--let alone a lost cause!"

And for once I was not sorry for Raffles to have the last unworthy
word, as he stood once more at his outer door and gayly waved me down
the stairs.

The Spoils of Sacrilege

There was one deed of those days which deserved a place in our original
annals. It is the deed of which I am personally most ashamed. I have
traced the course of a score of felonies, from their source in the
brain of Raffles to their issue in his hands. I have omitted all
mention of the one which emanated from my own miserable mind. But in
these supplementary memoirs, wherein I pledged myself to extenuate
nothing more