a thing I care to do,
and I sha'n't be happy till the papers tell me the poor devil is alive.
But a knock-out shot was the only chance for us then."

"Why? You don't get run in for being tempted, nor yet for showing that
you are!"

"But I should have deserved running in if I hadn't yielded to such a
temptation as that, Bunny. It was a chance in a hundred thousand! We
might go there every day of our lives, and never again be the only
outsiders in the room, with the billiard-marking Johnnie practically
out of ear-shot at one and the same time. It was a gift from the gods;
not to have taken it would have been flying in the face of Providence."

"But you didn't take it," said I. "You went and left it behind."

I wish I had had a Kodak for the little smile with which Raffles shook
his head, for it was one that he kept for those great moments of which
our vocation is not devoid. All this time he had been wearing his hat,
tilted a little over eyebrows no longer raised. And now at last I knew
where the gold cup was.

It stood for days upon his chimney-piece, this costly trophy whose
ancient history and final fate filled newspaper columns even in these
days of Jubilee, and for which the flower of Scotland Yard was said to
be seeking high and low. Our constable, we learnt, had been stunned
only, and, from the moment that I brought him an evening paper with the
news, Raffles's spirits rose to a height inconsistent with his equable
temperament, and as unusual in him as the sudden impulse upon which he
had acted with such effect. The cup itself appealed to me no more than
it had done before. Exquisite it might be, handsome it was, but so
light in the hand that the mere gold of it would scarcely have poured
three figures out of melting-pot. And what said Raffles but that he
would never melt it at all!

"Taking it was an offence against the laws of the land, Bunny. That is
nothing. But destroying it would be a crime against God and Art, and
may I be spitted on the vane of St. Mary Abbot's if I commit it!"

Talk such as this was unanswerable; indeed, the whole affair had passed
the pale of useful comment; and the one course left to a practical
person was to shrug his shoulders and enjoy the joke. This was not a
little enhanced by the newspaper reports, which described Raffles as a
handsome youth, and his unwilling accomplice as an older man of
blackguardly appearance and low type.

"Hits us both off rather neatl