being 'in the offing' when you
left?"

"My dear Bunny, but so he was!" cried Raffles. "Time was when I was
none too pure an amateur. But after this I take leave to consider
myself a professor of the professors. And I should like to see one
more capable of skippering their side!"

The Rest Cure

I had not seen Raffles for a month or more, and I was sadly in need of
his advice. My life was being made a burden to me by a wretch who had
obtained a bill of sale over the furniture in Mount Street, and it was
only by living elsewhere that I could keep the vulpine villain from my
door. This cost ready money, and my balance at the bank was sorely in
need of another lift from Raffles. Yet, had he been in my shoes, he
could not have vanished more effectually than he had done, both from
the face of the town and from the ken of all who knew him.

It was late in August; he never played first-class cricket after July,
when, a scholastic understudy took his place in the Middlesex eleven.
And in vain did I scour my Field and my Sportsman for the country-house
matches with which he wilfully preferred to wind up the season; the
matches were there, but never the magic name of A. J. Raffles. Nothing
was known of him at the Albany; he had left no instructions about his
letters, either there or at the club. I began to fear that some evil
had overtaken him. I scanned the features of captured criminals in the
illustrated Sunday papers; on each occasion I breathed again; nor was
anything worthy of Raffles going on. I will not deny that I was less
anxious on his account than on my own. But it was a double relief to
me when he gave a first characteristic sign of life.

I had called at the Albany for the fiftieth time, and returned to
Piccadilly in my usual despair, when a street sloucher sidled up to me
in furtive fashion and inquired if my name was what it is.

"'Cause this 'ere's for you," he rejoined to my affirmative, and with
that I felt a crumpled note in my palm.

It was from Raffles. I smoothed out the twisted scrap of paper, and on
it were just a couple of lines in pencil:

"Meet me in Holland Walk at dark to-night. Walk up and down till I
come. A. J. R."

That was all! Not another syllable after all these weeks, and the few
words scribbled in a wild caricature of his scholarly and dainty hand!
I was no longer to be alarmed by this sort of thing; it was all so like