Flippant as a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him for a right appreciation of those last words. That they were no mere words I know full well. That, but for the tragedy of his Italian life, that life would have sufficed him for years, if not for ever, I did and do still believe. But I alone see him as I saw him then, the lines upon his face, and the pain behind the lines; how they came to disappear, and what removed them, you will never guess. It was the one thing you would have expected to have the opposite effect, the thing indeed that had forced his confidence, the organ and the voice once more beneath our very windows: “Margarita de Parete, era a’ sarta d’ e’ signore; se pugneva sempe e ddete pe penzare a Salvatore! “Mar—ga—rì, e perzo e Salvatore! Mar—ga—rì, Ma l’ommo è cacciatore! Mar—ga—rì, Nun ce aje corpa tu! Chello ch’ è fatto, è fatto, un ne parlammo cchieù!” I simply stared at Raffles. Instead of deepening, his lines had vanished. He looked years younger, mischievous and merry and alert as I remembered him of old in the breathless crisis of some madcap escapade. He was holding up his finger; he was stealing to the window; he was peeping through the blind as though our side street were Scotland Yard itself; he was stealing back again, all revelry, excitement, and suspense. “I half thought they were after me before,” said he. “That was why I made you look. I daren’t take a proper look myself, but what a jest if they were! What a jest!” “Do you mean the police?” said I. “The police! Bunny, do you know them and me so little that you can look me in the face and ask such a question? My boy, I’m dead to them—off their books—a good deal deader than being off the hooks! Why, if I went to Scotland Yard this minute, to give myself up, they’d chuck me out for a harmless lunatic. No, I fear an enemy nowadays, and I go in terror of the sometime friend, but I have the utmost confidence in the dear police.” “Then whom do you mean?” “The Camorra!” I repeated the word with a different intonation. Not that I had never heard of that most powerful and sinister of secret societies; but I failed to see on what grounds Raffles should jump to the conclusion that these everyday organ-grinders belonged to it. “It was one of Corbucci’s threats,” said he. “If I killed him the Camorra would certainly kill me; he kept on telling me so; it was like his cunning not to say that he would put them on my tracks whether or no.” “He is probably a member himself!” “Obviously, from what he said.” “But why on earth should you think that these fellows are?” I demanded, as that brazen voice came rasping through a second verse.