he idea, but I must have been mistaken, and should certainly
sit up for him. The attentive soul brought in a plate of sandwiches
before she retired; and I prepared to make a night of it in a chair by
the sitting-room fire. Darkness and bed I could not face in my
anxiety. In a way I felt as though duty and loyalty called me out into
the winter's night; and yet whither should I turn to look for Raffles?
I could think of but one place, and to seek him there would be to
destroy myself without aiding him. It was my growing conviction that
he had been recognized when leaving Scotland Yard, and either taken
then and there, or else hunted into some new place of hiding. It would
all be in the morning papers; and it was all his own fault. He had
thrust his head into the lion's mouth, and the lion's jaws had snapped.
Had he managed to withdraw his head in time?

There was a bottle at my elbow, and that night I say deliberately that
it was not my enemy but my friend. It procured me at last some
surcease from my suspense. I fell fast asleep in my chair before the
fire. The lamp was still burning, and the fire red, when I awoke; but
I sat very stiff in the iron clutch of a wintry morning. Suddenly I
slued round in my chair. And there was Raffles in a chair behind me,
with the door open behind him, quietly taking off his boots.

"Sorry to wake you, Bunny," said he. "I thought I was behaving like a
mouse; but after a three hours' tramp one's feet are all heels."

I did not get up and fall upon his neck. I sat back in my chair and
blinked with bitterness upon his selfish insensibility. He should not
know what I had been through on his account.

"Walk out from town?" I inquired, as indifferently as though he were in
the habit of doing so.

"From Scotland Yard," he answered, stretching himself before the fire
in his stocking soles.

"Scotland Yard?" I echoed. "Then I was right; that's where you were
all the time; and yet you managed to escape!"

I had risen excitedly in my turn.

"Of course I did," replied Raffles. "I never thought there would be
much difficulty about that, but there was even less than I anticipated.
I did once find myself on one side of a sort of counter, and an officer
dozing at his desk at the other side. I thought it safest to wake him
up and make inquiries about a mythical purse left in a phantom hansom
outside the Carlton. And the way the fellow fired me out of that was
another credit to t