t rather watery one of early April. There was a green-and-gold
dust of buds and shoots on the trees as we passed the park. I felt
greater things sprouting in my heart. Hansoms passed with schoolboys
just home for the Easter holidays, four-wheelers outward bound, with
bicycles and perambulators atop; none that rode in them were half so
happy as I, with the great load on my cab, but the greater one off my
heart.

At Mount Street it just went into the lift; that was a stroke of luck;
and the lift-man and I between us carried it into my flat. It seemed a
featherweight to me now. I felt a Samson in the exaltation of that
hour. And I will not say what my first act was when I found myself
alone with my white elephant in the middle of the room; enough that the
siphon was still doing its work when the glass slipped through my
fingers to the floor.

"Bunny!"

It was Raffles. Yet for a moment I looked about me quite in vain. He
was not at the window; he was not at the open door. And yet Raffles it
had been, or at all events his voice, and that bubbling over with fun
and satisfaction, be his body where it might. In the end I dropped my
eyes, and there was his living face in the middle of the lid of the
chest, like that of the saint upon its charger.

But Raffles was alive, Raffles was laughing as though his vocal cords
would snap--there was neither tragedy nor illusion in the apparition of
Raffles. A life-size Jack-in-the-box, he had thrust his head through a
lid within the lid, cut by himself between the two iron bands that ran
round the chest like the straps of a portmanteau. He must have been
busy at it when I found him pretending to pack, if not far into that
night, for it was a very perfect piece of work; and even as I stared
without a word, and he crouched laughing in my face, an arm came
squeezing out, keys in hand; one was turned in either of the two great
padlocks, the whole lid lifted, and out stepped Raffles like the
conjurer he was.

"So you were the burglar!" I exclaimed at last. "Well, I am just as
glad I didn't know."

He had wrung my hand already, but at this he fairly mangled it in his.

"You dear little brick," he cried, "that's the one thing of all things
I longed to hear you say! How could you have behaved as you've done if
you had known? How could any living man? How could you have acted, as
the polar star of all the stages could not have acted in your place?
Remember that I have heard a