ch of a wintry morning. Suddenly I
slued round in my chair. And there was Raffles in a chair behind me,
with the door open behind him, quietly taking off his boots.

"Sorry to wake you, Bunny," said he. "I thought I was behaving like a
mouse; but after a three hours' tramp one's feet are all heels."

I did not get up and fall upon his neck. I sat back in my chair and
blinked with bitterness upon his selfish insensibility. He should not
know what I had been through on his account.

"Walk out from town?" I inquired, as indifferently as though he were
in the habit of doing so.

"From Scotland Yard," he answered, stretching himself before the fire
in his stocking soles.

"Scotland Yard!" I echoed. "Then I was right; that's where you were
all the time; and yet you managed to escape!"

I had risen excitedly in my turn.

"Of course I did," replied Raffles. "I never thought there would be
much difficulty about that, but there was even less than I
anticipated. I did once find myself on one side of a sort of counter,
and an officer dozing at his desk at the other side. I thought it
safest to wake him up and make inquiries about a mythical purse left
in a phantom hansom outside the Carlton. And the way the fellow fired
me out of that was another credit to the Metropolitan Police: it's
only in the savage countries that they would have troubled to ask how
one had got in."

"And how did you?" I asked. "And in the Lord's name, Raffles, when and
why?"

Raffles looked down on me under raised eyebrows, as he stood with his
coat tails to the dying fire.

"How and when, Bunny, you know as well as I do," said he, cryptically.
"And at last you shall hear the honest why and wherefore. I had more
reasons for going to Scotland Yard, my dear fellow, than I had the
face to tell you at the time."

"I don't care why you went there!" I cried. "I want to know why you
stayed, or went back, or whatever it was you may have done. I thought
they had got you, and you had given them the slip?"

Raffles smiled as he shook his head.

"No, no, Bunny; I prolonged the visit, as I paid it, of my own accord.
As for my reasons, they are far too many for me to tell you them all;
they rather weighed upon me as I walked out; but you'll see them for
yourself if you turn round."

I was standing with my back to the chair in which I had been asleep;
behind the chair was the round lodging-house table; and there,
reposing on the cloth with the whiskey and