match. Gentlemen and Players at single
wicket, by Jove!"

His eyes were brighter than I had known them for many a day. They
shone with the perverted enthusiasm which was roused in him only by the
contemplation of some new audacity. He kicked off his shoes and began
pacing his room with noiseless rapidity; not since the night of the Old
Bohemian dinner to Reuben Rosenthall had Raffles exhibited such
excitement in my presence; and I was not sorry at the moment to be
reminded of the fiasco to which that banquet had been the prelude.

"My dear A. J.," said I in his very own tone, "you're far too fond of
the uphill game; you will eventually fall a victim to the sporting
spirit and nothing else. Take a lesson from our last escape, and fly
lower as you value our skins. Study the house as much as you like, but
do--not--go and shove your head into Mackenzie's mouth!"

My wealth of metaphor brought him to a stand-still, with his cigarette
between his fingers and a grin beneath his shining eyes.

"You're quite right, Bunny. I won't. I really won't. Yet--you saw
old Lady Melrose's necklace? I've been wanting it for years! But I'm
not going to play the fool; honor bright, I'm not; yet--by Jove!--to
get to windward of the professors and Mackenzie too! It would be a
great game, Bunny, it would be a great game!"

"Well, you mustn't play it this week."

"No, no, I won't. But I wonder how the professors think of going to
work? That's what one wants to know. I wonder if they've really got
an accomplice in the house? How I wish I knew their game! But it's
all right, Bunny; don't you be jealous; it shall be as you wish."

And with that assurance I went off to my own room, and so to bed with
an incredibly light heart. I had still enough of the honest man in me
to welcome the postponement of our actual felonies, to dread their
performance, to deplore their necessity: which is merely another way of
stating the too patent fact that I was an incomparably weaker man than
Raffles, while every whit as wicked.

I had, however, one rather strong point. I possessed the gift of
dismissing unpleasant considerations, not intimately connected with the
passing moment, entirely from my mind. Through the exercise of this
faculty I had lately been living my frivolous life in town with as much
ignoble enjoyment as I had derived from it the year before; and
similarly, here at Milchester, in the long-dreaded cricket-week, I had
after a