ell it to bring you with me, but to get you
to give me certain information without feeling a beast about it. But,
as a matter of fact, it was no lie about old Hector Carruthers and
Lord Lochmaben, and anybody but you would have guessed the truth."

"What is the truth?"

"I as good as told you, Bunny, again and again."

"Then tell me now."

"If you read your paper there would be no need; but if you want to
know, old Carruthers headed the list of the Birthday Honors, and Lord
Lochmaben is the title of his choice."

And this miserable quibble was not a lie! My lip curled, I turned my
back without a word, and drove home to my Mount Street flat in a new
fury of savage scorn. Not a lie, indeed! It was the one that is half a
truth, the meanest lie of all, and the very last to which I could
have dreamt that Raffles would stoop. So far there had been a degree
of honor between us, if only of the kind understood to obtain between
thief and thief. Now all that was at an end. Raffles had cheated me.
Raffles had completed the ruin of my life. I was done with Raffles, as
she who shall not be named was done with me.

And yet, even while I blamed him most bitterly, and utterly abominated
his deceitful deed, I could not but admit in my heart that the result
was out of all proportion to the intent: he had never dreamt of doing
me this injury, or indeed any injury at all. Intrinsically the deceit
had been quite venial, the reason for it obviously the reason that
Raffles had given me. It was quite true that he had spoken of this
Lochmaben peerage as a new creation, and of the heir to it in a
fashion only applicable to Alick Carruthers. He had given me hints,
which I had been too dense to take, and he had certainly made more
than one attempt to deter me from accompanying him on this fatal
emprise; had he been more explicit, I might have made it my business
to deter him. I could not say in my heart that Raffles had failed to
satisfy such honor as I might reasonably expect to subsist between us.
Yet it seems to me to require a superhuman sanity always and
unerringly to separate cause from effect, achievement from intent.
And I, for one, was never quite able to do so in this case.

I could not be accused of neglecting my newspaper during the next few
wretched days. I read every word that I could find about the attempted
jewel-robbery in Palace Gardens, and the reports afforded me my sole
comfort. In the first place, it was only an attem