neighborhood, with the sole object of obtaining snap-shots over our own
old garden wall. Even Raffles could not keep his eyebrows down when I
showed him the prints one morning in the Albany. But he confined his
open criticisms to the house.

"Built in the late 'sixties, I see," said Raffles, "or else very early
in the 'seventies."

"Exactly when it was built," I replied. "But that's worthy of a
sixpenny detective, Raffles! How on earth did you know?"

"That slate tower bang over the porch, with the dormer windows and the
iron railing and flagstaff atop makes us a present of the period. You
see them on almost every house of a certain size built about thirty
years ago. They are quite the most useless excrescences I know."

"Ours wasn't," I answered, with some warmth. "It was my sanctum
sanctorum in the holidays. I smoked my first pipe up there, and wrote
my first verses."

Raffles laid a kindly hand upon my shoulder--"Bunny, Bunny, you can rob
the old place, and yet you can't hear a word against it?"

"That's different," said I relentlessly. "The tower was there in my
time, but the man I mean to rob was not."

"You really do mean to do it, Bunny?"

"By myself, if necessary? I averred.

"Not again, Bunny, not again," rejoined Raffles, laughing as he shook
his head. "But do you think the man has enough to make it worth our
while to go so far afield?"

"Far afield! It's not forty miles on the London and Brighton."

"Well, that's as bad as a hundred on most lines. And when did you say
it was to be?"

"Friday week."

"I don't much like a Friday, Bunny. Why make it one?"

"It's the night of their Hunt Point-to-Point. They wind up the season
with it every year; and the bloated Guillemard usually sweeps the board
with his fancy flyers."

"You mean the man in your old house?"

"Yes; and he tops up with no end of dinner there," I went on, "to his
hunting pals and the bloods who ride for him. If the festive board
doesn't groan under a new regiment of challenge cups, it will be no
fault of theirs, and old Guillemard will have to do them top-hole all
the same."

"So it's a case of common pot-hunting," remarked Raffles, eyeing me
shrewdly through the cigarette smoke.

"Not for us, my dear fellow," I made answer in his own tone. "I
wouldn't ask you to break into the next set of chambers here in the
Albany for a few pieces of modern silver, Raffles. Not that we need
scorn the cups if we get a cha