The usurer leant forward in his chair; he had long been sitting in the one which at first he had seemed inclined to wield as a defensive weapon. We all drew together into a smaller triangle. And I found our visitor looking specially hard at me for the first time. "I've seen you, too, before to-day," said he. "I thought I had, after you'd gone this morning, and when we met in the afternoon I made sure. It was at the Savoy when me and my wife were dining there and you gentlemen were at the next table." There was a crafty twinkle in his eye, but the natural allusion to the necklace was not made. "I suppose," he continued, "you are partners in--amusement? Otherwise I should insist on speaking to Mr. Raffles alone." "Bunny and I are one," said Raffles airily. "Though two to one--numerically speaking," remarked Levy, with a disparaging eye on me. "However, if you're both in the job, so much the more chance of bringing it off, I daresay. But you'll never 'ave to 'andle a lighter swag, gentlemen!" "More jewellery?" inquired Raffles, as one thoroughly enjoying the joke. "No--lighter than that--a letter!" "One little letter?" "That's all." "Of your own writing, Mr. Levy?" "No, sir!" thundered the money-lender, just when I could have sworn his lips were framing an affirmative. "I see; it was written to you, not by you." "Wrong again, Raffles!" "Then how can the letter be your property, my dear Mr. Levy?" There was a pause. The money-lender was at visible grips with some new difficulty. I watched his heavy but not unhandsome face, and timed the moment of mastery by the sudden light in his crafty eyes. "They think it was written by me," said he. "It's a forgery, written on my office paper; if that isn't my property, I should like to know what is?" "It certainly ought to be," returned Raffles, sympathetically. "Of course you're speaking of the crucial letter in your case against _Fact_?" "I am," said Levy, rather startled; "but 'ow did you know I was?" "I am naturally interested in the case." "And you've read about it in the papers; they've had a fat sight too much to say about it, with the whole case still _sub judice_." "I read the original articles in _Fact_" said Raffles. "And the letters I'm supposed to have written?" "Yes; there was only one of them that struck me as being slap in the wind's eye." "That's the one I want." "If it's genuine, Mr. Levy, it might easily form the basis of a more serious sort of case." "But it isn't genuine." "Nor would you be the first plaintiff in the High Court of Justice," pursued Raffles, blowing soft grey rings into the upper air, "who has been rather rudely transformed into the defendant at the Old Bailey." "But it isn't genuine, I'm telling you!" cried Dan Levy with a curse.