s was
still my infinite reward.

"I don't care," said he, "how deeply you had been dining: in vino
veritas, Bunny, and your pluck would always out! I have never doubted
it, and I never shall. In fact, I rely on nothing else to get us out
of this mess."

My face must have fallen, as my heart sank at these words. I had said
to myself that we were out of the mess already--that we had merely to
make a clean escape from the house--now the easiest thing in the world.
But as I looked at Raffles, and as Raffles looked at me, on the
threshold of the room where the three sleepers slept on without sound
or movement, I grasped the real problem that lay before us. It was
twofold; and the funny thing was that I had seen both horns of the
dilemma for myself, before Raffles came to his senses. But with
Raffles in his right mind, I had ceased to apply my own, or to carry my
share of our common burden another inch. It had been an unconscious
withdrawal on my part, an instinctive tribute to my leader; but, I was
sufficiently ashamed of it as we stood and faced the problem in each
other's eyes.

"If we simply cleared out," continued Raffles, "you would be
incriminated in the first place as my accomplice, and once they had you
they would have a compass with the needle pointing straight to me.
They mustn't have either of us, Bunny, or they will get us both. And
for my part they may as well!"

I echoed a sentiment that was generosity itself in Raffles, but in my
case a mere truism.

"It's easy enough for me," he went on. "I am a common house-breaker,
and I escape. They don't know me from Noah. But they do know you; and
how do you come to let me escape? What has happened to you, Bunny?
That's the crux. What could have happened after they all dropped off?"
And for a minute Raffles frowned and smiled like a sensation novelist
working out a plot; then the light broke, and transfigured him through
his burnt cork. "I've got it, Bunny!" he exclaimed. "You took some of
the stuff yourself, though of course not nearly so much as they did.

"Splendid!" I cried. "They really were pressing it upon me at the end,
and I did say it must be very little."

"You dozed off in your turn, but you were naturally the first to come
to yourself. I had flown; so had the gold brick, the jewelled belt,
and the silver statuette. You tried to rouse the others. You couldn't
succeed; nor would you if you did try. So what did you do? What's the
on