e it was all a game to him, and
the one game he knew that was always exciting, always full of danger
and of drama, I could just then have found it in my heart to try the
game myself! Not that he treated me to any ingenious sophistries or
paradoxical perversities. It was just his natural charm and humor, and
a touch of sadness with it all, that appealed to something deeper than
one's reason and one's sense of right. Glamour, I suppose, is the
word. Yet there was far more in him than that. There were depths,
which called to depths; and you will not misunderstand me when I say I
think it touched him that a woman should listen to him as I did, and in
such circumstances. I know that it touched me to think of such a life
so spent, and that I came to myself and implored him to give it all up.
I don't think I went on my knees over it. But I am afraid I did cry;
and that was the end. He pretended not to notice anything, and then in
an instant he froze everything with a flippancy which jarred horribly
at the time, but has ever since touched me more than all the rest. I
remember that I wanted to shake hands at the end. But Mr. Raffles only
shook his head, and for one instant his face was as sad as it was
gallant and gay all the rest of the time. Then he went as he had come,
in his own dreadful way, and not a soul in the house knew that he had
been. And even you were never told!

"I didn't mean to write all this about your own friend, whom you knew
so much better yourself, yet you see that even you did not know how
nobly he tried to undo the wrong he had done you; and now I think I
know why he kept it to himself. It is fearfully late--or early--I seem
to have been writing all night--and I will explain the matter in the
fewest words. I promised Mr. Raffles that I would write to you, Harry,
and see you if I could. Well, I did write, and I did mean to see you,
but I never had an answer to what I wrote. It was only one line, and I
have long known you never received it. I could not bring myself to
write more, and even those few words were merely slipped into one of
the books which you had given me. Years afterward these books, with my
name in them, must have been found in your rooms; at any rate they were
returned to me by somebody; and you could never have opened them, for
there was my line where I had left it. Of course you had never seen
it, and that was all my fault. But it was too late to write again.
Mr. Raffles