opera
hat, which he had hidden there on his way to the house. The thick socks
were peeled from his patent-leathers, the ragged trousers stripped from
an evening pair, bloodstains and Newgate fringe removed at the water's
edge, and the whole sepulchre whited in less time than the thing takes
to tell. Nor was that enough for Raffles, but he must alter me as
well, by wearing my overcoat under his cape, and putting his Zingari
scarf about my neck.

"And now," said he, "you may be glad to hear there's a 3:12 from
Surbiton, which we could catch on all fours. If you like we'll go
separately, but I don't think there's the slightest danger now,
and I begin to wonder what's happening to old blow-pipes."

So, indeed, did I, and with no small concern, until I read of his
adventures (and our own) in the newspapers. It seemed that he had made
a gallant spurt into the road, and there paid the penalty of his
rashness by a sudden incapacity to move another inch. It had
eventually taken him twenty minutes to creep back to locked doors, and
another ten to ring up the inmates. His description of my personal
appearance, as reported in the papers, is the only thing that
reconciles me to the thought of his sufferings during that half-hour.

But at the time I had other thoughts, and they lay too deep for idle
words, for to me also it was a bitter hour. I had not only failed in
my self-sought task; I had nearly killed my comrade into the bargain.
I had meant well by friend and foe in turn, and I had ended in doing
execrably by both. It was not all my fault, but I knew how much my
weakness had contributed to the sum. And I must walk with the man
whose fault it was, who had travelled two hundred miles to obtain this
last proof of my weakness, to bring it home to me, and to make our
intimacy intolerable from that hour. I must walk with him to Surbiton,
but I need not talk; all through Thames Ditton I had ignored his
sallies; nor yet when he ran his arm through mine, on the river front,
when we were nearly there, would I break the seal my pride had set upon
my lips.

"Come, Bunny," he said at last, "I have been the one to suffer most,
when all's said and done, and I'll be the first to say that I deserved
it. You've broken my head; my hair's all glued up in my gore; and what
yarn I'm to put up at Manchester, or how I shall take the field at all,
I really don't know. Yet I don't blame you, Bunny, and I do blame
myself. Isn't it rath