was in that respect still more hopeless (he who
had even played for them at Lord's), and he seemed to feel it. He
would not speak to me all the morning; in the afternoon he went for a
walk alone. It was another man who came home, flourishing a small
bottle packed in white paper.

"Bunny," said he, "I never did lift my elbow; it's the one vice I never
had. It has taken me all these years to find my tipple, Bunny; but
here it is, my panacea, my elixir, my magic philtre!"

I thought he had been at it on the road, and asked him the name of the
stuff.

"Look and see, Bunny."

And if it wasn't a bottle of ladies' hair-dye, warranted to change any
shade into the once fashionable yellow within a given number of
applications!

"What on earth," said I, "are you going to do with this?"

"Dye for my country," he cried, swelling. "Dulce et decorum est,
Bunny, my boy!"

"Do you mean that you are going to the front?"

"If I can without coming to it."

I looked at him as he stood in the firelight, straight as a dart, spare
but wiry, alert, laughing, flushed from his wintry walk; and as I
looked, all the years that I had known him, and more besides, slipped
from him in my eyes. I saw him captain of the eleven at school. I saw
him running with the muddy ball on days like this, running round the
other fifteen as a sheep-dog round a flock of sheep. He had his cap on
still, and but for the gray hairs underneath--but here I lost him in a
sudden mist. It was not sorrow at his going, for I did not mean to let
him go alone. It was enthusiasm, admiration, affection, and also, I
believe, a sudden regret that he had not always appealed to that part
of my nature to which he was appealing now. It was a little thrill of
penitence. Enough of it.

"I think it great of you," I said, and at first that was all.

How he laughed at me. He had had his innings; there was no better way
of getting out. He had scored off an African millionaire, the Players,
a Queensland Legislator, the Camorra, the late Lord Ernest Belville,
and again and again off Scotland Yard. What more could one man do in
one lifetime? And at the worst it was the death to die: no bed, no
doctor, no temperature--and Raffles stopped himself.

"No pinioning, no white cap," he added, "if you like that better."

"I don't like any of it," I cried, cordially; "you've simply got to
come back."

"To what?" he asked, a strange look on him.

And I wondered--for one