Neither did our disguises accompany our countenances across the Channel. It was at dead of night on the upper deck (whence all but us had fled) that Raffles showed me how to doff my beard and still look as though I had merely buttoned it inside my overcoat; meanwhile his own moustachios and imperial were disappearing by discreet degrees; and at last he told me why, though not by any means without pressing. "I'm only afraid you'll want to turn straight back from Calais, Bunny!" "Oh, no, I shan't." "You'll come with me round the world, so to speak?" "To its uttermost ends, A. J.!" "You do know now who it really is that I don't want to see again just yet?" "Yes. I know. Now tell me what Mackenzie told you." "It was all in the wire he showed me," said Raffles. "The wire was to say that the murderer of Dan Levy had given himself up to the police!" Profane expletives flew from my lips; those of much holier men might have been no less unguardedly emphatic in the self-same circumstances. "But who was it?" "I could have told you all along if you hadn't suspected me." "It wasn't a suspicion, Raffles. It was never more than a dread, and I didn't even dread it in my heart of hearts. Do tell me now." Raffles watched the red end of a ruined Sullivan make a fine trajectory as it flew to leeward between sea and stars. "It was that poor unlucky little alien who was waiting for him the other morning in Jermyn Street, and again last night near his own garden gate. That's where he got him in the end. But it wasn't a shooting case at all, Bunny; that's why I never heard anything. It was a case of stabbing in accordance with the best traditions of the Latin races." "God forgive both poor devils!" said I at last. "And other two," said Raffles, "who have rather more to be forgiven." CHAPTER XIX Apologia On one of the worst days of last year, to wit the first day of the Eton and Harrow match, I had turned into the Hamman, in Jermyn Street, as the best available asylum for wet boots that might no longer enter any club. Mine had been removed by a little pinchbeck oriental in the outer courts, and I wandered within unpleasantly conscious of a hole in one sock, to find myself by no means the only obvious refugee from the rain. The bath was in fact inconveniently crowded. But at length I found a divan to suit me in an upstairs alcove. I had the choice indeed of more than one; but in spite of my antecedents I am fastidious about my cooling companions in a Turkish bath, and it was by no accident that I hung my clothes opposite to a newer morning coat and a pair of trousers more decisively creased than my own.