"What is it, then?"
"Your treatment of me, Mr. Levy."
"A cursed crook like you!"
"A party to a pretty definite bargain, however, and a discredited person only so far as that bargain is concerned."
"And the rest!" said the money-lender, jeering feebly. "I know more about you than you guess."
"I should have put it the other way round," replied Raffles, smiling. "But we are both forgetting ourselves, prisoner in the bunk. Kindly note that your trial is resumed, and further contempt will not be allowed to go unpurged. You referred a moment ago to my unfortunate friends; you say they were the engineers of their own misfortunes. That might be said of all who ever put themselves in your clutches. You squeeze them as hard as the law will let you, and in this case I don't see how the law is to interfere. So I interfere myself—in the first instance as disastrously as you please."
"You did so!" exclaimed Levy, with a flicker of his inflamed eyes. "You brought things to a head; that's all you did."
"On the contrary, you and I came to an agreement which still holds good," said Raffles, significantly. "You are to return me a certain note of hand for thirteen thousand and odd pounds, taken in exchange for a loan of ten thousand, and you are also to give an understanding to leave another fifteen thousand of yours on mortgage for another year at least, instead of foreclosing, as you threatened and had a right to do this week. That was your side of the bargain."
"Well," said Levy, "and when did I go back on it?"
"My side," continued Raffles, ignoring the interpolation, "was to get you by hook or crook a certain letter which you say you never wrote. As a matter of fact it was only to be got by crook—"