said I certainly shall not. Let your man or men bring up the chest
at once. I dare say they also have been 'at it with others all. the
afternoon,' but I shall make this worth their while."

I did not mind driving through the streets with the thing this time.
My present relief was too overwhelming as yet to admit of pangs and
fears for the immediate future. No summer sun had ever shone more
brightly than that rather watery one of early April. There was a
green-and-gold dust of buds and shoots on the trees as we passed the
park. I felt greater things sprouting in my heart. Hansoms passed
with schoolboys just home for the Easter holidays, four-wheelers
outward bound, with bicycles and perambulators atop; none that rode
in them were half so happy as I, with the great load on my cab, but
the greater one off my heart.

At Mount Street it just went into the lift; that was a stroke of
luck; and the lift-man and I between us carried it into my flat.
It seemed a featherweight to me now. I felt a Samson in the
exaltation of that hour. And I will not say what my first act was
when I found myself alone with my white elephant in the middle of
the room; enough that the siphon was still doing its work when the
glass slipped through my fingers to the floor.

"Bunny!"

It was Raffles. Yet for a moment I looked about me quite in vain.
He was not at the window; he was not at the open door. And yet
Raffles it had been, or at all. events his voice, and that bubbling
over with fun and satisfaction, be his body where it might. In the
end I dropped my eyes, and there was his living face in the middle