ple? His coming to my rooms at midnight,
merely to tell me about his dinner, was in itself enough to excuse a
suspicion which was certainly at variance with my knowledge of A. J.
Raffles.

"What did he say?" I inquired mechanically, divining some subtler
explanation of this visit, and wondering what on earth it could be.

"Say?" cried Raffles. "What did he not say! He boasted of his rise,
he bragged of his riches, and he blackguarded society for taking him up
for his money and dropping him out of sheer pique and jealousy because
he had so much. He mentioned names, too, with the most charming
freedom, and swore he was as good a man as the Old Country had to
show--PACE the Old Bohemians. To prove it he pointed to a great diamond
in the middle of his shirt-front with a little finger loaded with
another just like it: which of our bloated princes could show a pair
like that? As a matter of fact, they seemed quite wonderful stones,
with a curious purple gleam to them that must mean a pot of money. But
old Rosenthall swore he wouldn't take fifty thousand pounds for the
two, and wanted to know where the other man was who went about with
twenty-five thousand in his shirt-front and another twenty-five on his
little finger. He didn't exist. If he did, he wouldn't have the pluck
to wear them. But he had--he'd tell us why. And before you could say
Jack Robinson he had whipped out a whacking great revolver!"

"Not at the table?"

"At the table! In the middle of his speech! But it was nothing to
what he wanted to do. He actually wanted us to let him write his name
in bullets on the opposite wall, to show us why he wasn't afraid to go
about in all his diamonds! That brute Purvis, the prize-fighter, who
is his paid bully, had to bully his master before he could be persuaded
out of it. There was quite a panic for the moment; one fellow was
saying his prayers under the table, and the waiters bolted to a man."

"What a grotesque scene!"

"Grotesque enough, but I rather wish they had let him go the whole hog
and blaze away. He was as keen as knives to show us how he could take
care of his purple diamonds; and, do you know, Bunny, _I_ was as keen
as knives to see."

And Raffles leaned towards me with a sly, slow smile that made the
hidden meaning of his visit only too plain to me at last.

"So you think of having a try for his diamonds yourself?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"It is horribly obvious, I admit. But--y