"It wouldn't have been the game, Bunny--won or lost--Teddy or no Teddy: And yet," he added, with pensive candour, "we were getting on like a semi-detached house on fire! I burnt my fingers, I don't mind telling you; if I hadn't been what I am, Bunny, I might have taken my courage in all ten of 'em, and 'put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.'" "I wish you had," I whispered, as he studied his paper upside down. "Why, Bunny? What rot you do talk!" he cried, but only with the skin-deep irritation of a half-hearted displeasure. "She's the only woman I ever met," I went on unguardedly, "who was your mate at heart--in pluck--in temperament!" "How the devil do you know?" cried Raffles, off his own guard now, and staring in my guilty face. But I have never denied that I could emulate his presence of mind upon occasion. "You forget what a lot we saw of each other last Thursday in the rain." "Did she talk about me then?" "A little." "Had she her knife in me, Bunny?" "Well--yes--a little!" Raffles smiled stoically: it was a smile of duty done and odds well damned. "Up to the hilt, Bunny, up to the hilt is what you mean. I stuck it in for her. It's easily done, and it needed doing, for my sake if not for hers. Sooner or later I should have choked her off, so the sooner the better. You play them false, you cut a dance, you let them down over something that doesn't matter, and they'll never give you a dog's chance over anything that does! I got her to write and never answered. What do you think of that for a cavalier swine? I said I'd call before I went abroad, and only wired to say sorry I couldn't. I don't say it would or could have been all right otherwise; but you see it was all right for Teddy before I got back! Which was as it was to be. She would hardly look at me at first last week; but, Bunny, she wasn't above looking when that old Shylock was playing at giving me away before them all. She looked at him, and she looked at me, and I've got one of the looks she gave him, and another that she never meant me to see, bottled in my blackguard heart forever!" Raffles looked dim to me across the narrow compartment; but there was no nonsense in his look or voice. I longed to tell him all I knew, all that she had said to me and he had unwittingly interpreted; that she loved him, as now at last I knew she did; but I had given her my word, and after all it was a word to keep for both their sakes as well as for its own. "You were made for each other, you two!" That was all I said, and Raffles only laughed. "All the more reason to hook it round the world, Bunny, before there's a dog's chance of our meeting again."