it was you--I believe you have a double who plays your cricket
for you!"

And at the moment that seemed less incredible than the fact.

"I'm afraid you didn't read your paper very carefully," said Raffles,
with the first trace of pique in his tone. "It was rain that closed
play before five o'clock. I hear it was a sultry day in town, but at
Manchester we got the storm, and the ground was under water in ten
minutes. I never saw such a thing in my life. There was absolutely not
the ghost of a chance of another ball being bowled. But I had changed
before I thought of doing what I did. It was only when I was on my way
back to the hotel, by myself, because I couldn't talk to a soul for
thinking of you, that on the spur of the moment I made the man take me
to the station instead, and was under way in the restaurant car before
I had time to think twice about it. I am not sure that of all the mad
deeds I have ever done, this was not the maddest of the lot!"

"It was the finest," I said in a low voice; for now I marvelled more
at the impulse which had prompted his feat, and at the circumstances
surrounding it, than even at the feat itself.

"Heaven knows," he went on, "what they are saying and doing in
Manchester! But what can they say? What business is it of theirs? I
was there when play stopped, and I shall be there when it starts
again. We shall be at Waterloo just after half-past three, and that's
going to give me an hour at the Albany on my way to Euston, and
another hour at Old Trafford before play begins. What's the matter
with that? I don't suppose I shall notch any more, but all the better
if I don't; if we have a hot sun after the storm, the sooner they get
in the better; and may I have a bowl at them while the ground bites!"

"I'll come up with you," I said, "and see you at it."

"My dear fellow," replied Raffles, "that was my whole feeling about
you. I wanted to 'see you at it'--that was absolutely all. I wanted to
be near enough to lend a hand if you got tied up, as the best of us
will at times. I knew the ground better than you, and I simply
couldn't keep away from it. But I didn't mean you to know that I was
there; if everything had gone as I hoped it might, I should have
sneaked back to town without ever letting you know I had been up. You
should never have dreamt that I had been at your elbow; you would have
believed in yourself, and in my belief in you, and the rest would have
been silence till the grave.