ed your construe for the second-school in the
summer term) was mercifully handy; and once in our rubber soles we had
no difficulty in scaling the gates beyond the fives-courts. Moreover,
we dropped into a very desert of a country road, nor saw a soul when
we doubled back beneath the outer study windows, nor heard a foot-fall
in the main street of the slumbering town. Our own fell like the
night-dews and the petals of the poet; but Raffles ran his arm through
mine, and would chatter in whispers as we went.

"So you and Nipper had a word--or was it words? I saw you out of the
tail of my eye when I was dancing, and I heard you out of the tail of
my ear. It sounded like words, Bunny, and I thought I caught my name.
He's the most consistent man I know, and the least altered from a boy.
But he'll subscribe all right, you'll see, and be very glad I made
him."

I whispered back that I did not believe it for a moment. Raffles had
not heard all Nasmyth had said of him. And neither would he listen to
the little I meant to repeat to him; he would but reiterate a
conviction so chimerical to my mind that I interrupted in my turn to
ask him what ground he had for it.

"I've told you already," said Raffles. "I mean to make him."

"But how?" I asked. "And when, and where?"

"At Philippi, Bunny, where I said I'd see him. What a rabbit you are
at a quotation!

"'And I think that the field of Philippi
Was where Caesar came to an end;
But who gave old Brutus the tip, I
Can't comprehend!'

"You may have forgotten your Shakespeare, Bunny, but you ought to
remember that."

And I did, vaguely, but had no idea what it or Raffles meant, as I
plainly told him.

"The theatre of war," he answered--"and here we are at the stage
door!"

Raffles had stopped suddenly in his walk. It was the last dark hour of
the summer night, but the light from a neighboring lamp-post showed me
the look on his face as he turned.

"I think you also inquired when," he continued. "Well, then, this
minute--if you will give me a leg up!"

And behind him, scarcely higher than his head, and not even barred,
was a wide window with a wire blind, and the name of Nasmyth among
others lettered in gold upon the wire.

"You're never going to break in?"

"This instant, if you'll help me; in five or ten minutes, if you
won't."

"Surely you didn't bring the--the tools?"

He jingled them gently in his pocket.

"Not the whole outfit, B