the glimmer of an
emerald nor the glint of a diamond, nor yet the flashing constellation
of a tiara in her hair. I gripped Raffles in token of my triumph, and
he nodded as he scanned the overwhelming majority of flushed
fox-hunters. With the exception of one stripling, evidently the son of
the house, they were in evening pink to a man; and as I say, their
faces matched their coats. An enormous fellow, with a great red face
and cropped moustache, occupied my poor father's place; he it was who
had replaced our fruitful vineries with his stinking stables; but I am
bound to own he looked a genial clod, as he sat in his fat and
listened to the young bloods boasting of their prowess, or
elaborately explaining their mishaps. And for a minute we listened
also, before I remembered my responsibilities, and led Raffles round
to the back of the house.

There never was an easier house to enter. I used to feel that keenly
as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my bugbear, and I
looked under my bed every night in life. The bow-windows on the ground
floor finished in inane balconies to the first-floor windows. These
balconies had ornamental iron railings, to which a less ingenious
rope-ladder than ours could have been hitched with equal ease. Raffles
had brought it with him, round his waist, and he carried the
telescopic stick for fixing it in place. The one was unwound, and the
other put together, in a secluded corner of the red-brick walls, where
of old I had played my own game of squash-rackets in the holidays. I
made further investigations in the starlight, and even found a trace
of my original white line along the red wall.

But it was not until we had effected our entry through the room which
had been my very own, and made our parlous way across the lighted
landing, to the best bedroom of those days and these, that I really
felt myself a worm. Twin brass bedsteads occupied the site of the old
four-poster from which I had first beheld the light. The doors were
the same; my childish hands had grasped these very handles. And there
was Raffles securing the landing door with wedge and gimlet, the very
second after softly closing it behind us.

"The other leads into the dressing-room, of course? Then you might be
fixing the outer dressing-room door," he whispered at his work, "but
not the middle one Bunny, unless you want to. The stuff will be in
there, you see, if it isn't in here."

My door was done in a moment, be