"But when you fired I felt a murderess," she said. "So you see I misjudged you for the second time."
If I am conveying a dash of flippancy in our talk, let me earnestly declare that it was hardly even a dash. It was but a wry and rueful humour on the girl's part, and that only towards the end, but I can promise my worst critic that I was never less facetious in my life. I was thinking in my heavy way that I had never looked into such eyes as these, so bold, so sad, so merry with it all! I was thinking that I had never listened to such a voice, or come across recklessness and sentiment so harmonised, save also in her eyes! I was thinking that there never was a girl to touch Camilla Belsize, or a man either except A. J. Raffles! And yet—
And yet it was over Raffles that she took all the wind from my sails, exactly as she had done at Lord's, only now she did it at parting, and sent me off into the dusk a slightly puzzled and exceedingly exasperated man.
"Of course," said Camilla at her garden gate, "of course you won't repeat a word of what I've told you, Mr. Manders?"
"You mean about your adventures last night and to-day?" said I, somewhat taken aback.
"I mean every single thing we've talked about!" was her sweeping reply. "Not a syllable must go an inch further; otherwise I shall be very sorry I ever spoke to you."
As though she had come and confided in me of her own accord! But I passed that, even if I noticed it at the time.
"I won't tell a soul, of course," I said, and fidgeted. "That is—except—I suppose you don't mind—"
"I do! There must be no exceptions."
"Not even old Raffles?"