rnative than his
going into the town. He kept him in his own room for the evening and
saw him to bed, Raffles all the while amusing himself with the
annoyance he was causing this decent and highly prosperous
fellow-sinner, an amusement which he facetiously expressed as sympathy
with his friend's pleasure in entertaining a man who had been
serviceable to him, and who had not had all his earnings. There was a
cunning calculation under this noisy joking--a cool resolve to extract
something the handsomer from Bulstrode as payment for release from this
new application of torture. But his cunning had a little overcast its
mark.

Bulstrode was indeed more tortured than the coarse fibre of Raffles
could enable him to imagine. He had told his wife that he was simply
taking care of this wretched creature, the victim of vice, who might
otherwise injure himself; he implied, without the direct form of
falsehood, that there was a family tie which bound him to this care,
and that there were signs of mental alienation in Raffles which urged
caution. He would himself drive the unfortunate being away the next
morning. In these hints he felt that he was supplying Mrs. Bulstrode
with precautionary information for his daughters and servants, and
accounting for his allowing no one but himself to enter the room even
with food and drink. But he sat in an agony of fear lest Raffles
should be overheard in his loud and plain references to past facts--lest
Mrs. Bulstrode should be even tempted to listen at the door. How
could he hinder her, how betray his terror by opening the door to
detect her? She was a woman of honest direct habits, and little likely
to take so low a course in order to arrive at painful knowledge; but
fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

In this way Raffles had pushed the torture too far, and produced an
effect which had not been in his plan. By showing himself hopelessly
unmanageable he had made Bulstrode feel that a strong defiance was the
only resource left. After taking Raffles to bed that night the banker
ordered his closed carriage to be ready at half-past seven the next
morning. At six o'clock he had already been long dressed, and had
spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading his motives for
averting the worst evil if in anything he had used falsity and spoken
what was not true before God. For Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie
with an intensity disproportionate to the number