miled as he secured a regular puttee of dust-sheeting. No
blood was coming through.

"I don't agree, Bunny," said he. "It's quite the best of it, if you
ask me."

"What, that he should die the death?"

"Why not?"

And Raffles stared me out with a hard and merciless light in his clear
blue eyes--a light that chilled the blood.

"If it's a choice between his life and our liberty, you're entitled to
your decision and I'm entitled to mine, and I took it before I bound
him as I did," said Raffles. "I'm only sorry I took so much trouble if
you're going to stay behind and put him in the way of releasing
himself before he gives up the ghost. Perhaps you will go and think it
over while I wash my bags and dry 'em at the gas-stove. It will take
me at least an hour, which will just give me time to finish the last
volume of Kinglake."

Long before he was ready to go, however, I was waiting in the hall,
clothed indeed, but not in a mind which I care to recall. Once or
twice I peered into the dining-room where Raffles sat before the
stove, without letting him hear me. He, too, was ready for the street
at a moment's notice; but a steam ascended from his left leg, as he
sat immersed in his red volume. Into the study I never went again; but
Raffles did, to restore to its proper shelf this and every other book
he had taken out and so destroy that clew to the manner of man who had
made himself at home in the house. On his last visit I heard him whisk
off the dust-sheet; then he waited a minute; and when he came out it
was to lead the way into the open air as though the accursed house
belonged to him.

"We shall be seen," I whispered at his heels. "Raffles, Raffles,
there's a policeman at the corner!"

"I know him intimately," replied Raffles, turning, however, the other
way. "He accosted me on Monday, when I explained that I was an old
soldier of the colonel's regiment, who came in every few days to air
the place and send on any odd letters. You see, I have always carried
one or two about me, redirected to that address in Switzerland, and
when I showed them to him it was all right. But after that it was no
use listening at the letter-box for a clear coast, was it?"

I did not answer; there was too much to exasperate in these prodigies
of cunning which he could never trouble to tell me at the time. And I
knew why he had kept his latest feats to himself: unwilling to trust
me outside the house, he had systematically exaggerated t