seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn out
about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King's Cross; that is,
of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run my three or
four miles for a bob or less. And it not only keeps you in the very
pink: if you're good they let you carry the trunks upstairs; and I've
taken notes from the inside of more than one commodious residence
which will come in useful in the autumn. In fact, Bunny, what with
these new Rowton houses, my beard, and my otherwise well-spent
holiday, I hope to have quite a good autumn season before the erratic
Raffles turns up in town."

I felt it high time to wedge in a word about my own far less
satisfactory affairs. But it was not necessary for me to recount half
my troubles. Raffles could be as full of himself as many a worse man,
and I did not like his society the less for these human outpourings.
They had rather the effect of putting me on better terms with myself,
through bringing him down to my level for the time being. But his
egoism was not even skin-deep; it was rather a cloak, which Raffles
could cast off quicker than any man I ever knew, as he did not fail to
show me now.

"Why, Bunny, this is the very thing!" he cried. "You must come and
stay with me, and we'll lie low side by side. Only remember it really
is a Rest Cure. I want to keep literally as quiet as I was without
you. What do you say to forming ourselves at once into a practically
Silent Order? You agree? Very well, then, here's the street and that's
the house."

It was ever such a quiet little street, turning out of one of those
which climb right over the pleasant hill. One side was monopolized by
the garden wall of an ugly but enviable mansion standing in its own
ground; opposite were a solid file of smaller but taller houses; on
neither side were there many windows alight, nor a solitary soul on
the pavement or in the road. Raffles led the way to one of the small
tall houses. It stood immediately behind a lamp-post, and I could not
but notice that a love-lock of Virginia creeper was trailing almost to
the step, and that the bow-window on the ground floor was closely
shuttered. Raffles admitted himself with his latch-key, and I squeezed
past him into a very narrow hall. I did not hear him shut the door,
but we were no longer in the lamplight, and he pushed softly past me
in his turn.

"I'll get a light," he muttered as he went; but to let him pass I had
leaned aga