g
colonel himself. He was ready for me, a revolver
in his hand 76

Raffles was as excited as any of us now; he
outstripped us all 106

He kept us laughing in his study until the
chapel bells rang him out 152

The ragged trousers stripped from an evening
pair 176

Down went the trap-door with a bang 232

No one can make out what this little thick
velvet bag's for 260

* * * * *

A Thief in the Night

Out of Paradise

If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but go back to our
earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left by discretion in
existing annals. In so doing I may indeed fill some small part of an
infinitely greater blank, across which you may conceive me to have
stretched my canvas for the first frank portrait of my friend. The
whole truth cannot harm him now. I shall paint in every wart. Raffles
was a villain, when all is written; it is no service to his memory to
gloze the fact; yet I have done so myself before to-day. I have
omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dwelt unduly on the redeeming
side. And this I may do again, blinded even as I write by the gallant
glamour that made my villain more to me than any hero. But at least
there shall be no more reservations, and as an earnest I shall make no
further secret of the greatest wrong that even Raffles ever did me.

I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as I still would be to my
friend, and yet remembering as I must those Ides of March when he led
me blindfold into temptation and crime. That was an ugly office, if
you will. It was a moral bagatelle to the treacherous trick he was to
play me a few weeks later. The second offence, on the other hand, was
to prove the less serious of the two against society, and might in
itself have been published to the world years ago. There have been
private reasons for my reticence. The affair was not only too
intimately mine, and too discreditable to Raffles. One other was
involved in it, one dearer to me than Raffles himself, one whose name
shall not even now be sullied by association with ours.

Suffice it that I had been engaged to her before that mad March deed.
True, her people called it "an understanding," and frowned even upon
that, as well they might. But their