"Ah! I keep forgetting you're a young beginner," said Levy, catching the old note in his turn. "A beginner who's scarcely likely to go on, Mr. Levy, if all cribs are as easy to crack as that lawyers' office of yours in Gray's Inn Square." "As easy?" Raffles recollected his pose. "It was enormous fun," said he. "Of course one couldn't know that there would be no hitch. There was an exciting moment towards the end. I have to thank you for quite a new thrill of sorts. But, my dear Mr. Levy, it was as easy as ringing the bell and being shown in; it only took rather longer." "What about the caretaker?" asked the usurer, with a curiosity no longer to be concealed. "He obliged me by taking his wife to the theatre." "At your expense?" "No, Mr. Levy, the item will be debited to you in due course." "So you got in without any difficulty?" "Over the roof." "And then?" "I hit upon the right room." "And then, Raffles?" "I opened the right safe." "Go on, man!" But the man was only going on at his own rate, and the more Levy pressed him, the greater his apparent reluctance to go on at all. "Well, I found the letter all right. Oh, yes, I made a copy of it. Was it a good copy? Almost too good, if you ask me." Thus Raffles under increasing pressure. "Well? Well? You left that one there, I suppose? What happened next?" There was no longer any masking the moneylender's eagerness to extract the _dénouement_ of Raffles's adventure; that it required extracting must have seemed a sufficient earnest of the ultimate misadventure so craftily plotted by Levy himself. His great nose glowed with the imminence of victory. His strong lips loosened their habitual hold upon each other, and there was an impressionist daub of yellow fang between. The brilliant little eyes were reduced to sparkling pinheads of malevolent glee. This was not the fighting face I knew better and despised less, it was the living epitome of low cunning and foul play. "The next thing that happened," said Raffles, in his most leisurely manner, "was the descent of Bunny like a bolt from the blue." "Had he gone in with you?" "No; he came in after me as bold as blazes to say that a couple of common, low detectives were waiting for me down below in the square!" "That was very kind of 'im," snarled Levy, pouring a murderous fire upon my person from his little black eyes. "Kind!" cried Raffles. "It saved the whole show." "It did, did it?" "I had time to dodge the limbs of the law by getting out another way, and never letting them know that I had got out at all." "Then you left them there?" "In their glory!" said Raffles, radiant in his own.