I had no language for my mortification and disgust, though neither was as yet quite so great as my surprise. I had foreseen almost every conceivable consequence of the mad act which brought all this trouble to pass, but a voluntary division between Raffles and me had certainly never entered my calculations. Nor could I think that it had occurred to him before our egregious doctor’s last visit, this very morning. Raffles had looked irritated as he broke the news to me from his pillow, and now there was some sympathy in the way he sat up in bed, as though he felt the thing himself. “I am obliged to give in to the fellow,” said he. “He’s saving me from my friend, and I’m bound to humor him. But I can tell you that we’ve been arguing about you for the last half hour, Bunny. It was no use; the idiot has had his knife in you from the first; and he wouldn’t see me through on any other conditions.” “So he is going to see you through, is he?” “It tots up to that,” said Raffles, looking at me rather hard. “At all events he has come to my rescue for the time being, and it’s for me to manage the rest. You don’t know what it has been, Bunny, these last few weeks; and gallantry forbids that I should tell you even now. But would you rather elope against your will, or have your continued existence made known to the world in general and the police in particular? That is practically the problem which I have had to solve, and the temporary solution was to fall ill. As a matter of fact, I am ill; and now what do you think? I owe it to you to tell you, Bunny, though it goes against the grain. She would take me ‘to the dear, warm underworld, where the sun really shines,’ and she would ‘nurse me back to life and love!’ The artistic temperament is a fearsome thing, Bunny, in a woman with the devil’s own will!” Raffles tore up the letter from which he had read these piquant extracts, and lay back on the pillows with the tired air of the veritable invalid which he seemed able to assume at will. But for once he did look as though bed was the best place for him; and I used the fact as an argument for my own retention in defiance of Dr. Theobald. The town was full of typhoid, I said, and certainly that autumnal scourge was in the air. Did he want me to leave him at the very moment when he might be sickening for a serious illness? “You know I don’t, my good fellow,” said Raffles, wearily; “but Theobald does, and I can’t afford to go against him now. Not that I really care what happens to me now that that woman knows I’m in the land of the living; she’ll let it out, to a dead certainty, and at the best there’ll be a hue and cry, which is the very thing I have escaped all these years. Now, what I want you to do is to go and take some quiet place somewhere, and then let me know, so that I may have a port in the storm when it breaks.” “Now you’re talking!” I cried, recovering my spirits. “I thought you meant to go and drop a fellow altogether!”