ined for a moment. On the contrary,
I was impatient of the delay ordained by Raffles; and, perhaps, no
small part of my secret disaffection came of his galling determination
to do without me until the last moment.

It made it no better that this was characteristic of the man and of his
attitude towards me. For a month we had been, I suppose, the thickest
thieves in all London, and yet our intimacy was curiously incomplete.
With all his charming frankness, there was in Raffles a vein of
capricious reserve which was perceptible enough to be very irritating.
He had the instinctive secretiveness of the inveterate criminal. He
would make mysteries of matters of common concern; for example, I never
knew how or where he disposed of the Bond Street jewels, on the
proceeds of which we were both still leading the outward lives of
hundreds of other young fellows about town. He was consistently
mysterious about that and other details, of which it seemed to me that
I had already earned the right to know everything. I could not but
remember how he had led me into my first felony, by means of a trick,
while yet uncertain whether he could trust me or not.

That I could no longer afford to resent, but I did resent his want of
confidence in me now. I said nothing about it, but it rankled every
day, and never more than in the week that succeeded the Rosenthall
dinner. When I met Raffles at the club he would tell me nothing; when
I went to his rooms he was out, or pretended to be.

One day he told me he was getting on well, but slowly; it was a more
ticklish game than he had thought; but when I began to ask questions he
would say no more. Then and there, in my annoyance, I took my own
decision. Since he would tell me nothing of the result of his vigils,
I determined to keep one on my own account, and that very evening found
my way to the millionaire's front gates.

The house he was occupying is, I believe, quite the largest in the St.
John's Wood district. It stands in the angle formed by two broad
thoroughfares, neither of which, as it happens, is a 'bus route, and I
doubt if many quieter spots exist within the four-mile radius. Quiet
also was the great square house, in its garden of grass-plots and
shrubs; the lights were low, the millionaire and his friends obviously
spending their evening elsewhere. The garden walls were only a few
feet high. In one there was a side door opening into a glass passage;
in the other two f