l
houses. It stood immediately behind a lamppost, and I could not but
notice that a love-lock of Virginia creeper was trailing almost to the
step, and that the bow-window on the ground floor was closely
shuttered. Raffles admitted himself with his latch-key, and I squeezed
past him into a very narrow hall. I did not hear him shut the door,
but we were no longer in the lamplight, and he pushed softly past me in
his turn.

"I'll get a light," he muttered as he went; but to let him pass I had
leaned against some electric switches, and while 'his back was turned I
tried one of these without thinking. In an instant hall and staircase
were flooded with light; in another Raffles was upon me in a fury, and,
all was dark once more. He had not said a word, but I heard him
breathing through his teeth.

Nor was there anything to tell me now. The mere flash of electric
light upon a hail of chaos and uncarpeted stairs, and on the face of
Raffles as he sprang to switch it off, had been enough even for me.

"So this is how you have taken the house," said I in his own undertone.
"'Taken' is good; 'taken' is beautiful!"

"Did you think I'd done it through an agent?" he snarled. "Upon my
word, Bunny, I did you the credit of supposing you saw the joke all the
time!"

"Why shouldn't you take a house," I asked, "and pay for it?"

"Why should I," he retorted, "within three miles of the Albany?
Besides, I should have had no peace; and I meant every word I said
about my Rest Cure."

"You are actually staying in a house where you've broken in to steal?"

"Not to steal, Bunny! I haven't stolen a thing. But staying here I
certainly am, and having the most complete rest a busy man could wish."

"There'll be no rest for me!"

Raffles laughed as he struck a match. I had followed him into what
would have been the back drawing-room in the ordinary little London
house; the inspector of prisons had converted it into a separate study
by filling the folding doors with book-shelves, which I scanned at once
for the congenial works of which Raffles had spoken. I was not able to
carry my examination very far. Raffles had lighted a candle, stuck (by
its own grease) in the crown of an opera hat, which he opened the
moment the wick caught. The light thus struck the ceiling in an oval
shaft, which left the rest of the room almost as dark as it had been
before.

"Sorry, Bunny!" said Raffles, sitting on one pedestal of a desk from
which t