












A Thief in the Night

[A Book of Raffles' Adventures]


by

E. W. Hornung




Contents

  Out of Paradise
  The Chest of Silver
  The Rest Cure
  The Criminologists' Club
  The Field of Phillipi
  A Bad Night
  A Trap to Catch a Cracksman
  The Spoils of Sacrilege
  The Raffles Relics




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