A Thief in the Night | Page 3

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This Etext prepared by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer.

A Thief in the Night
[A Book of Raffles' Adventures]
by E. W. Hornung

Out of Paradise
If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but back to our earliest days
together, and fill in the blanks left by discretion in existing annals. In so
doing I may indeed fill some small part of an infinitely greater blank,
across which you may conceive me to have stretched my canvas for the
first frank portrait of my friend. The whole truth cannot harm him now.
I shall paint in every wart. Raffles was a villain, when all is written; it
is no service to his memory to glaze the fact; yet I have done so myself
before to-day. I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dwelt
unduly on the redeeming side. And this I may do again, blinded even as
I write by the gallant glamour that made my villain more to me than
any hero. But at least there shall be no more reservations, and as an
earnest I shall make no further secret of the greatest wrong that even
Raffles ever did me.
I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as I still would be to my
friend, and yet remembering as I must those Ides of March when he led
me blindfold into temptation and crime. That was an ugly office, if you
will. It was a moral bagatelle to the treacherous trick he was to play me
a few weeks later. The second offence, on the other hand, was to prove
the less serious of the two against society, and might in itself have been
published to the world years ago. There have been private reasons for
my reticence. The affair was not only too intimately mine, and too
discreditable to Raffles. One other was involved in it, one dearer to me
than Raffles himself, one whose name shall not even now be sullied by
association with ours.
Suffice it that I had been engaged to her before that mad March deed.
True, her people called it "an understanding," and frowned even upon

that, as well they might. But their authority was not direct; we bowed to
it as an act of politic grace; between us, all was well but my
unworthiness. That may be gauged when I confess that this was how
the matter stood on the night I gave a worthless check for my losses at
baccarat, and afterward turned to Raffles in my need. Even after that I
saw her sometimes. But I let her guess that there was more upon my
soul than she must ever share, and at last I had written to end it all. I
remember that week so well! It was the