me like stealing back
into one's childhood; and yet I could conduct it without compunction.
I was too excited to feel immediate remorse, albeit not too lost in
excitement to know that remorse for every step that I was taking would
be my portion soon enough. I mean every word that I have written of my
peculiar shame for this night's work. And it was all to come over me
before the night was out. But in the garden I never felt it once.

The dining-room windows blazed in the side of the house facing the
road. That was an objection to peeping through the venetian blinds, as
we nevertheless did, at our peril of observation from the road. Raffles
would never have led me into danger so gratuitous and unnecessary, but
he followed me into it without a word. I can only plead that we both
had our reward. There was a sufficient chink in the obsolete
venetians, and through it we saw every inch of the picturesque board.
Mrs. Guillemard was still in her place, but she really was the only
lady, and dressed as quietly as I had prophesied; round her neck was
her rope of pearls, but not the glimmer of an emerald nor the glint of
a diamond, nor yet the flashing constellation of a tiara in her hair.
I gripped Raffles in token of my triumph, and he nodded as he scanned
the overwhelming majority of flushed fox-hunters. With the exception
of one stripling, evidently the son of the house, they were in evening
pink to a man; and as I say, their faces matched their coats. An
enormous fellow, with a great red face and cropped moustache, occupied
my poor father's place; he it was who had replaced our fruitful
vineries with his stinking stables; but I am bound to own he looked a
genial clod, as he sat in his fat and listened to the young bloods
boasting of their prowess, or elaborately explaining their mishaps.
And for a minute we listened also, before I remembered my
responsibilities, and led Raffles round to the back of the house.

There never was an easier house to enter. I used to feel that keenly
as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my bugbear, and I
looked under my bed every night in life. The bow-windows on the ground
floor finished in inane balconies to the first-floor windows. These
balconies had ornamental iron railings, to which a less ingenious
rope-ladder than ours could have been hitched with equal ease. Raffles
had brought it with him, round his waist, and he carried the telescopic
stick for fixing it in pl