I felt it high time to wedge in a word about my own far less
satisfactory affairs. But it was not necessary for me to recount
half my troubles. Raffles could be as full of himself as many a
worse man, and I did not like his society the less for these human
outpourings. They had rather the effect of putting me on better
terms with myself, through bringing him down to my level for the
time being. But his egoism was not even skin-deep; it was rather
a cloak, which Raffles could cast off quicker than any man I ever
knew, as he did not fail to show me now.

"Why, Bunny, this is the very thing!" he cried. "You must come and
stay with me, and we'll lie low side by side. Only remember it
really is a Rest Cure. I want to keep literally as quiet as I was
without you. What do you say to forming ourselves at once into a
practically Silent Order? You agree? Very well, then, here's the
street and that's the house."

It was ever such a quiet little street, turning out of one of those
which climb right over the pleasant hill. One side was monopolized
by the garden wall of an ugly but enviable mansion standing in its
own ground; opposite were a solid file of smaller but taller houses;
on neither side were there many windows alight, nor a solitary soul
on the pavement or in the road. Raffles led the way to one of the
small tall houses. It stood immediately behind a lamppost, and I
could not but notice that a love-lock of Virginia creeper was
trailing almost to the step, and that the bow-window on the ground
floor was closely shuttered. Raffles admitted himself with his
latch-key, and I squeezed past him into a very narrow hall. I did
not hear him shut the door, but we were no longer in the lamplight,