A Thief in the Night

[A Book of Raffles' Adventures]

by E. W. Hornung




Out of Paradise

If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but back to our
earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left by discretion
in existing annals. In so doing I may indeed fill some small part
of an infinitely greater blank, across which you may conceive me
to have stretched my canvas for the first frank portrait of my
friend. The whole truth cannot harm him now. I shall paint in
every wart. Raffles was a villain, when all is written; it is no
service to his memory to glaze the fact; yet I have done so myself
before to-day. I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have
dwelt unduly on the redeeming side. And this I may do again, blinded
even as I write by the gallant glamour that made my villain more to
me than any hero. But at least there shall be no more reservations,
and as an earnest I shall make no further secret of the greatest
wrong that even Raffles ever did me.

I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as I still would be to my
friend, and yet remembering as I must those Ides of March when he
led me blindfold into temptation and crime. That was an ugly office,
if you will. It was a moral bagatelle to the treacherous trick he