troke of luck;
and the lift-man and I between us carried it into my flat. It seemed a
featherweight to me now. I felt a Samson in the exaltation of that
hour. And I will not say what my first act was when I found myself
alone with my white elephant in the middle of the room; enough that
the siphon was still doing its work when the glass slipped through my
fingers to the floor.

"Bunny!"

It was Raffles. Yet for a moment I looked about me quite in vain. He
was not at the window; he was not at the open door. And yet Raffles it
had been, or at all events his voice, and that bubbling over with fun
and satisfaction, be his body where it might. In the end I dropped my
eyes, and there was his living face in the middle of the lid of the
chest, like that of the saint upon its charger.

But Raffles was alive, Raffles was laughing as though his vocal cords
would snap--there was neither tragedy nor illusion in the apparition
of Raffles. A life-size Jack-in-the-box, he had thrust his head
through a lid within the lid, cut by himself between the two iron
bands that ran round the chest like the straps of a portmanteau. He
must have been busy at it when I found him pretending to pack, if not
far into that night, for it was a very perfect piece of work; and even
as I stared without a word, and he crouched laughing in my face, an
arm came squeezing out, keys in hand; one was turned in either of the
two great padlocks, the whole lid lifted, and out stepped Raffles like
the conjurer he was.

"So you were the burglar!" I exclaimed at last. "Well, I am just as
glad I didn't know."

He had wrung my hand already, but at this he fairly mangled it in his.

"You dear little brick," he cried, "that's the one thing of all things
I longed to hear you say! How could you have behaved as you've done if
you had known? How could any living man? How could you have acted, as
the polar star of all the stages could not have acted in your place?
Remember that I have heard a lot, and as good as seen as much as I've
heard. Bunny, I don't know where you were greatest: at the Albany,
here, or at your bank!"

"I don't know where I was most miserable," I rejoined, beginning to
see the matter in a less perfervid light. "I know you don't credit me
with much finesse, but I would undertake to be in the secret and to do
quite as well; the only difference would be in my own peace of mind,
which, of course, doesn't count."

But Raffles wagged away with his most