There was a bottle at my elbow, and that night I say deliberately that it was not my enemy but my friend. It procured me at last some surcease from my suspense. I fell fast asleep in my chair before the fire. The lamp was still burning, and the fire red, when I awoke; but I sat very stiff in the iron clutch of a wintry morning. Suddenly I slued round in my chair. And there was Raffles in a chair behind me, with the door open behind him, quietly taking off his boots.
"Sorry to wake you, Bunny," said he. "I thought I was behaving like a mouse; but after a three hours' tramp one's feet are all heels."
I did not get up and fall upon his neck. I sat back in my chair and blinked with bitterness upon his selfish insensibility. He should not know what I had been through on his account.
"Walk out from town?" I inquired, as indifferently as though he were in the habit of doing so.
"From Scotland Yard," he answered, stretching himself before the fire in his stocking soles.
"Scotland Yard?" I echoed. "Then I was right; that's where you were all the time; and yet you managed to escape!"
I had risen excitedly in my turn.
"Of course I did," replied Raffles. "I never thought there would be much difficulty about that, but there was even less than I anticipated. I did once find myself on one side of a sort of counter, and an officer dozing at his desk at the other side. I thought it safest to wake him up and make inquiries about a mythical purse left in a phantom hansom outside the Carlton. And the way the fellow fired me out of that was another credit to the Metropolitan Police: it's only in the savage countries that they would have troubled to ask how one had got in."
"And how did you?" I asked. "And in the Lord's name, Raffles, when and why?"
Raffles looked down on me under raised eyebrows, as he stood with his coat tails to the dying fire.