Lord Thornaby stared at me with inscrutable stolidity as we shook
hands, and at once handed me over to a tall, ungainly man whom he
addressed as Ernest, but whose surname I never learned. Ernest in
turn introduced me, with a shy and clumsy courtesy, to the two
remaining guests. They were the pair who had driven up in the hansom;
one turned out to be Kingsmill, Q.C.; the other I knew at a glance
from his photographs as Parrington, the backwoods novelist. They were
admirable foils to each other, the barrister being plump and dapper,
with a Napoleonic cast of countenance, and the author one of the
shaggiest dogs I have ever seen in evening-clothes. Neither took much
stock of me, but both had an eye on Raffles as I exchanged a few words
with each in turn. Dinner, however, was immediately announced, and the
six of us had soon taken our places round a brilliant little table
stranded in a great dark room.

I had not been prepared for so small a party, and at first I felt
relieved. If the worst came to the worst, I was fool enough to say in
my heart, they were but two to one. But I was soon sighing for that
safety which the adage associates with numbers. We were far too few
for the confidential duologue with one's neighbor in which I, at
least, would have taken refuge from the perils of a general
conversation. And the general conversation soon resolved itself into
an attack, so subtly concerted and so artistically delivered that I
could not conceive how Raffles should ever know it for an attack, and
that against himself, or how to warn him of his peril. But to this day
I am not convinced that I also was honored by the suspicions of the
club; it may have been so, and they may have ignored me for the bigger
game.

It was Lord Thornaby himself who fired the first shot, over the very
sherry. He had Raffles on his right hand, and the backwoodsman of
letters on his left. Raffles was hemmed in by the law on his right,
while I sat between Parrington and Ernest, who took the foot of the
table, and seemed a sort of feudatory cadet of the noble house. But it
was the motley lot of us that my lord addressed, as he sat back
blinking his baggy eyes.

"Mr. Raffles," said he, "has been telling me about that poor fellow
who suffered the extreme penalty last March. A great end, gentlemen, a
great end! It is true that he had been unfortunate enough to strike a
jugular vein, but his own end should take its place among the most
glorious traditio