"Oh, yes, I agree with you, Raffles; but it will be a terribly hard task for me!"
"It will, indeed, Mr. Garland. Yet no news is always good news, and I promise to come straight to you the moment I have news of any kind."
With that they shook hands, our host with an obvious reluctance that turned to a less understandable dismay as I also prepared to take my leave of him.
"What!" cried he, "am I to be left quite alone to hoodwink that poor girl and hide my own anxiety?"
"There's no reason why you should come, Bunny," said Raffles to me. "If either of them is a one-man job, it's mine."
Our host said no more, but he looked at me so wistfully that I could not but offer to stay with him if he wished it; and when at length the drawing-room door had closed upon him and his son's fiancee, I took an umbrella from the stand and saw Raffles through the providential downpour into the brougham.
"I'm sorry, Bunny," he muttered between the butler in the porch and the coachman on the box. "This sort of thing is neither in my line nor yours, but it serves us right for straying from the path of candid crime. We should have opened a safe for that seven hundred."
"But what do you really think is at the bottom of this extraordinary disappearance?"
"Some madness or other, I'm afraid; but if that boy is still in the land of the living, I shall have him before the sun goes down on his insanity."
"And what about this engagement of his?" I pursued. "Do you disapprove of it?"