if I heard it, I should know
it again. I've got my faculties as if I was in my prime, but names
wear out, by Jove! Sometimes I'm no better than a confounded tax-paper
before the names are filled in. However, if I hear of her and her
family, you shall know, Nick. You'd like to do something for her, now
she's your step-daughter."

"Doubtless," said Mr. Bulstrode, with the usual steady look of his
light-gray eyes; "though that might reduce my power of assisting you."

As he walked out of the room, Raffles winked slowly at his back, and
then turned towards the window to watch the banker riding away--virtually
at his command. His lips first curled with a smile and then opened
with a short triumphant laugh.

"But what the deuce was the name?" he presently said, half aloud,
scratching his head, and wrinkling his brows horizontally. He had not
really cared or thought about this point of forgetfulness until it
occurred to him in his invention of annoyances for Bulstrode.

"It began with L; it was almost all l's I fancy," he went on, with a
sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name. But the hold was
too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase; for few men
were more impatient of private occupation or more in need of making
themselves continually heard than Mr. Raffles. He preferred using his
time in pleasant conversation with the bailiff and the housekeeper,
from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to know about Mr.
Bulstrode's position in Middlemarch.

After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed
relieving with bread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone
with these resources in the wainscoted parlor, he suddenly slapped his
knee, and exclaimed, "Ladislaw!" That action of memory which he had
tried to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly
completed itself without conscious effort--a common experience,
agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no
value. Raffles immediately took out his pocket-book, and wrote down
the name, not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of
not being at a loss if he ever did happen to want it. He was not going
to tell Bulstrode: there was no actual good in telling, and to a mind
like that of Mr. Raffles there is always probable good in a secret.

He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o'clock that
day he had taken up his portmanteau at the turnpike and mounted the