"There's the mate!" he observed, quietly.
"By Jove, Raffles—it must be!" I cried, for beyond all question, in the woof of the design on the base of the pepper-pot was the cipher "A.R. to C.C." "Where the dickens did you get it?"
"That was a wedding-present to my mother," he explained. "That's why I have never sold it, not even when I've been on the edge of starvation."
"From whom—do you happen to know?" I inquired.
"Yes," he replied. "I do know. It was a wedding-present to the daughter of
Raffles by her father, my grandfather, Raffles himself."
"Great Heavens!" I cried. "Then it was Raffles who—well, you know. That
London flat job?"
"Precisely," said Raffles Holmes. "We've caught the old gentleman red- handed."
"Well, I'll be jiggered!" said I. "Doesn't it beat creation how small the world is."
"It does indeed. I wonder who the chap is who has the other," Raffles observed.
"Pretty square of the old General to keep quiet about it," said I.