"But that note from Studley may have been half-an-hour on the way."
"No, Raffles, it's not an ordinary note; it's a message telephoned straight from Lord's—probably within the last few minutes—to a messenger office not a hundred yards from this door!"
Mr. Garland sat staring miserably at the carpet; he was beginning to look ill with perplexity and suspense. Raffles himself, who had turned his back upon us with a shrug of acquiescence in the inevitable, was a monument of discomfiture as he stood gazing through a glass door into the adjoining conservatory. There was no actual window in the library, but this door was a single sheet of plate-glass into which a man might well have walked, and I can still see Raffles in full-length silhouette upon a panel of palms and tree-ferns. I see the silhouette grow tall and straight again before my eyes, the door open, and Raffles listening with an alert lift of the head. I, too, hear something, an elfin hiss, a fairy fusillade, and then the sudden laugh with which Raffles rejoined us in the body of the room.
"It's raining!" he cried, waving a hand above his head. "Have you a barometer, Mr. Garland?"
"That's an aneroid under the lamp-bracket."
"How often do you set the indicator?"
"Last thing every night. I remember it was between Fair and Change when I went to bed. It made me anxious."
"It may make you thankful now. It's between Change and Rain this morning. And the rain's begun, and while there's rain there's hope!"
In a twinkling Raffles had regained all his own irresistible buoyancy and assurance. But the older man was not capable of so prompt a recovery.
"Something has happened to my boy!"