ght like a tub first, and you'll find all ready in the
room at the end of the passage. Sing out if there's anything you want.
Your luggage hasn't turned up yet, by the way, but here's a letter that
came this morning.'

"'Not for me?'

"'Yes; didn't you expect one?'

"'I certainly did not!'

"'Well, here it is.'

"And, as he lit me to my room, I read my own superscription of the
previous day--to W. F. Raffles!

"Bunny, you've had your wind bagged at footer, I daresay; you know what
that's like? All I can say is that my moral wind was bagged by that
letter as I hope, old chap, I have never yet bagged yours. I couldn't
speak. I could only stand with my own letter in my hands until he had
the good taste to leave me by myself.

"W. F. Raffles! We had mistaken EACH OTHER for W. F. Raffles--for the
new manager who had not yet arrived! Small wonder we had conversed at
cross-purposes; the only wonder was that we had not discovered our
mutual mistake. How the other man would have laughed! But I--I could
not laugh. By Jove, no, it was no laughing matter for me! I saw the
whole thing in a flash, without a tremor, but with the direst
depression from my own single point of view. Call it callous if you
like, Bunny, but remember that I was in much the same hole as you've
since been in yourself, and that I had counted on this W. F. Raffles
even as you counted on A. J. I thought of the man with the W. G.
beard--the riderless horse and the bloody saddle--the deliberate
misdirection that had put me off the track and out of the way--and now
the missing manager and the report of bushrangers at this end. But I
simply don't pretend to have felt any personal pity for a man whom I
had never seen; that kind of pity's usually cant; and besides, all mine
was needed for myself.

"I was in as big a hole as ever. What the devil was I to do? I doubt
if I have sufficiently impressed upon you the absolute necessity of my
returning to Melbourne in funds. As a matter of fact it was less the
necessity than my own determination which I can truthfully ascribe as
absolute.

"Money I would have--but how--but how? Would this stranger be open to
persuasion--if I told him the truth? No; that would set us all
scouring the country for the rest of the night. Why should I tell him?
Suppose I left him to find out his mistake ... would anything be
gained? Bunny, I give you my word that I went in to dinner without a
definite intention in