from the balcony, and now I could only see his head
as he peered into a cabinet at the other side of the room. It was like
the opera of Aida, in which two scenes are enacted simultaneously, one
in the dungeon below, the other in the temple above. In the same
fashion my attention now became divided between the picture of Raffles
moving stealthily about the upper room, and that of the husband and
wife at table underneath. And all at once, as the man replenished his
glass with a shrug of the shoulders, the woman pushed back her chair
and sailed to the door.

Raffles was standing before the fireplace upstairs. He had taken one
of the framed photographs from the chimney-piece, and was scanning it
at suicidal length through the eye-holes in the hideous mask which he
still wore. He would need it after all. The lady had left the room
below, opening and shutting the door for herself; the man was filling
his glass once more. I would have shrieked my warning to Raffles, so
fatally engrossed overhead, but at this moment (of all others) a
constable (of all men) was marching sedately down our side of the
square. There was nothing for it but to turn a melancholy eye upon the
bath-chair, and to ask the constable the time. I was evidently to be
kept there all night, I remarked, and only realized with the words that
they disposed of my other explanations before they were uttered. It
was a horrible moment for such a discovery. Fortunately the enemy was
on the pavement, from which he could scarcely have seen more than the
drawing-room ceiling, had he looked; but he was not many houses distant
when a door opened and a woman gasped so that I heard both across the
road. And never shall I forget the subsequent tableaux in the lighted
room behind the low balcony and the French windows.

Raffles stood confronted by a dark and handsome woman whose profile, as
I saw it first in the electric light, is cut like a cameo in my memory.
It had the undeviating line of brow and nose, the short upper lip, the
perfect chin, that are united in marble oftener than in the flesh; and
like marble she stood, or rather like some beautiful pale bronze; for
that was her coloring, and she lost none of it that I could see,
neither trembled; but her bosom rose and fell, and that was all. So
she stood without flinching before a masked ruffian, who, I felt, would
be the first to appreciate her courage; to me it was so superb that I
could think of it in t