charming and disarming smile; he
was in old clothes, rather tattered and torn, and more than a little
grimy as to the face and hands, but, on the surface, wonderfully
little the worse for his experience. And, as I say, his smile was the
smile of the Raffles I loved best.

"You would have done your damnedest, Bunny! There is no limit to your
heroism; but you forget the human equation in the pluckiest of the
plucky. I couldn't afford to forget it, Bunny; I couldn't afford to
give a point away. Don't talk as though I hadn't trusted you! I
trusted my very life to your loyal tenacity. What do you suppose would
have happened to me if you had let me rip in that strong-room? Do you
think I would ever have crept out and given myself up? Yes, I'll have
a peg for once; the beauty of all laws is in the breaking, even of the
kind we make unto ourselves."

I had a Sullivan for him, too; and in another minute he was spread out
on my sofa, stretching his cramped limbs with infinite gusto, a
cigarette between his fingers, a yellow bumper at hand on the chest of
his triumph and my tribulation.

"Never mind when it occurred to me, Bunny; as a matter of fact, it was
only the other day, when I had decided to go away for the real reasons
I have already given you. I may have made more of them to you than I
do in my own mind, but at all events they exist. And I really did want
the telephone and the electric light."

"But where did you stow the silver before you went?"

"Nowhere; it was my luggage--a portmanteau, cricket-bag, and suit-case
full of very little else--and by the same token I left the lot at
Euston, and one of us must fetch them this evening."

"I can do that," said I. "But did you really go all the way to Crewe?"

"Didn't you get my note? I went all the way to Crewe to post you those
few lines, my dear Bunny! It's no use taking trouble if you don't take
trouble enough; I wanted you to show the proper set of faces at the
bank and elsewhere, and I know you did. Besides, there was an up-train
four minutes after mine got in. I simply posted my letter in Crewe
station, and changed from one train to the other."

"At two in the morning!"

"Nearer three, Bunny. It was after seven when I slung in with the
_Daily Mail_. The milk had beaten me by a short can. But even so I had
two very good hours before you were due."

"And to think," I murmured, "how you deceived me there!"

"With your own assistance," said Raffles laughing. "