Mr. Justice Raffles

I returned her property. We had been staring at each other all the time.

I stared still harder as she repeated her perfunctory thanks.

"So it was you!" I said, and was sorry to see her looking purposely puzzled at that, but thankful when the reckless light outshone all the rest in those chameleon eyes of hers.

"Who did you think it was?" she asked me with a frosty little smile.

"I didn't know if it was anybody at all. I didn't know what to think," said I, quite candidly. "I simply found his pistol in my hand."

"Whose pistol?"

"Dan Levy's."

"Good!" she said grimly. "That makes it all the better."

"You saved my life."

"I thought you had taken his—and I'd collaborated!"

There was not a tremor in her voice; it was cautious, eager, daring, intense, but absolutely her own voice now.

"No," I said, "I didn't shoot the fellow, but I made him think I had."

"You made me think so too, until I heard what you said to him."

"Yet you never made a sound yourself."

"I should think not! I made myself scarce instead."

"But, Miss Belsize, I shall go perfectly mad if you don't tell me how you happened to be there at all!"

"Don't you think it's for you to tell me that about yourself and—all of you?"

"Oh, I don't mind which of us fires first!" said I, excitedly.

"Then I will," she said at once, and took me to the dreadful sofa at the inner end of the room, and sat down as though it were the most ordinary experience she had to relate. Nor could I believe the things that had really happened, and all so recently, as we talked them over in that commonplace environment of faded gentility. There was a window behind us, overlooking the ribbon of lawn and the cord of gravel, and the bunch of willows that hedged them from the Thames. It all looked unreal to me, unreal in its very realism as the scene of our incredible conversation.

"You know what happened the other afternoon—I mean the day they couldn't play," began Miss Belsize, "because you were there; and though you didn't stay to hear all that came out afterwards, I expect you know everything now. Mr. Raffles would be sure to tell you; in fact, I heard poor dear Mr. Garland give him leave. It's a dreadful story from every point of view. Nobody comes out of it with flying colours, but what nice person could cope with a horrid money-lender? Mr. Raffles, perhaps—if you call him nice!"

I said that was about the worst thing I called him. I mentioned some of the other things. Miss Belsize listened to them with exemplary patience.

"Well," she resumed, "he was quite nice about this. I will say that for him. He said he knew Mr. Levy pretty well, and would see what could be done. But he spoke like an executioner who was going to see what could be done with the condemned man! And all the time I was wondering what had been done already at Carlsbad—what exactly that horrid creature meant when he was talking at Mr. Raffles before us all. Well, of course, I knew what he meant us to think he meant; but was there, could there be, anything in it?"

Miss Belsize looked at me as though she expected an answer, only to stop me the moment I opened my mouth to speak.

"I don't want to know, Mr. Manders! Of course you know all about Mr. Raffles"—there was a touch of feeling in this—"but it's nothing to me, though in this case I should certainly have been on his side. You said yourself that it could only have been a practical joke, if there was anything in it at all, and so I tried to think in spite of those horrid men who were following him about at Lord's, even in spite of the way he vanished with them after him. But he never came near the match again—though he had travelled all the way from Carlsbad to see it! Why had he ever been there? What had he really done there? And what could he possibly do to rescue anybody from Mr. Levy, if he himself was already in Levy's power?"

"You don't know Raffles," said I, promptly enough this time. "He never was in any man's power for many minutes. I would back him to save the most desperate situation you could devise."

"You mean by some desperate deed? That's what I feared," declared Miss Belsize, rather strenuously. "Something really had happened at Carlsbad; something worse was by way of happening next. For Teddy's sake," she whispered, "and his poor father's!"

I agreed that old Raffles stuck at nothing for his friends, and Miss Belsize again said that was what she had feared. Her tone had completely altered about Raffles, as well it might. I thought it would have broken with gratitude when she spoke of the unlucky father and son.

"And I was right!" she exclaimed, with that other kind of feeling to which I found it harder to put a name. "I came home miserable from the match on Saturday—"

"Though Teddy had done so well!" I was fool enough to interject.

"I couldn't help thinking about Mr. Raffles," replied Camilla, with a flash of her frank eyes, "and wondering, and wondering, what had happened. And then on Sunday I saw him on the river."

"He didn't tell me."