not come down to Esher yourself by the last train?
That's it--down you come with the latest news! I'll tell old Debenham
to expect you: he shall give us both a bed. By Jove! he won't be able
to do us too well if he's got his picture."

"If!" I groaned as he nodded his adieu; and he left me limp with
apprehension, sick with fear, in a perfectly pitiable condition of pure
stage-fright.

For, after all, I had only to act my part; unless Raffles failed where
he never did fail, unless Raffles the neat and noiseless was for once
clumsy and inept, all I had to do was indeed to "smile and smile and be
a villain." I practiced that smile half the afternoon. I rehearsed
putative parts in hypothetical conversations. I got up stories. I
dipped in a book on Queensland at the club. And at last it was 7.45,
and I was making my bow to a somewhat elderly man with a small bald
head and a retreating brow.

"So you're Mr. Raffles's friend?" said he, overhauling me rather rudely
with his light small eyes. "Seen anything of him? Expected him early
to show me something, but he's never come."

No more, evidently, had his telegram, and my troubles were beginning
early. I said I had not seen Raffles since one o'clock, telling the
truth with unction while I could; even as we spoke there came a knock
at the door; it was the telegram at last, and, after reading it
himself, the Queenslander handed it to me.

"Called out of town!" he grumbled. "Sudden illness of near relative!
What near relatives has he got?"

I knew of none, and for an instant I quailed before the perils of
invention; then I replied that I had never met any of his people, and
again felt fortified by my veracity.

"Thought you were bosom pals?" said he, with (as I imagined) a gleam of
suspicion in his crafty little eyes.

"Only in town," said I. "I've never been to his place."

"Well," he growled, "I suppose it can't be helped. Don't know why he
couldn't come and have his dinner first. Like to see the death-bed I'D
go to without MY dinner; it's a full-skin billet, if you ask me. Well,
must just dine without him, and he'll have to buy his pig in a poke
after all. Mind touching that bell? Suppose you know what he came to
see me about? Sorry I sha'n't see him again, for his own sake. I
liked Raffles--took to him amazingly. He's a cynic. Like cynics. One
myself. Rank bad form of his mother or his aunt, and I hope she will
go and kick the bucket."

I conn