Mr. Justice Raffles

'Any other little point in common?'

'I had a good look at the hand that pointed the revolver.'

Raffles held out his hands.

'Better have a good look at mine.'

'His were as black as his face, but even yours are no smoother or better kept.'

'Well, I hope you'll clap the bracelets on them yet, Mr. Levy.'

'You'll get your wish, I promise you, Mr. Raffles.'

'You don't mean to say you've spotted your man?' cried A.J. airily.

'I've got my eye on him!' replied Dan Levy, looking Raffles through and through.

'And won't you tell us who he is?' asked Raffles, returning that deadly look with smiling interest, but answering a tone as deadly in one that maintained the note of persiflage in spite of Daniel Levy.

For Levy alone had changed the key with his last words; to that point I declare the whole passage might have gone for banter before the keenest eyes and the sharpest ears in Europe. I alone could know what a duel the two men were fighting behind their smiles. I alone could follow the finer shades, the mutual play of glance and gesture, the subtle tide of covert battle. So now I saw Levy debating with himself as to whether he should accept this impudent challenge and denounce Raffles there and then. I saw him hesitate, saw him reflect. The crafty, coarse, emphatic face was easily read; and when it suddenly lit up with a baleful light, I felt we might be on our guard against something more malign than mere reckless denunciation.

'Yes!' whispered a voice I hardly recognised. 'Won't you tell us who it was?'

'Not yet,' replied Levy, still looking Raffles full in the eyes. 'But I know all about him now!'

I looked at Miss Belsize; she it was who had spoken, her pale face set, her pale lips trembling. I remembered her many questions about Raffles during the morning. And I began to wonder whether after all I was the only entirely understanding witness of what had passed here in the firelit hall.

Mr. Garland, at any rate, had no inkling of the truth. Yet even in that kindly face there was a vague indignation and distress, though it passed almost as our eyes met. Into his there had come a sudden light; he sprang up as one alike rejuvenated and transfigured; there was a quick step in the porch, and next instant the truant Teddy was in our midst.

Mr. Garland met him with outstretched hand but not a question or a syllable of surprise; it was Teddy who uttered the cry of joy, who stood gazing at his father and raining questions upon him as though they had the hall to themselves. What was all this in the evening papers? Who had put it in? Was there any truth in it at all?

'None, Teddy,' said Mr. Garland, with some bitterness; 'my health was never better in my life.'

'Then I can't understand it,' cried the son, with savage simplicity. 'I suppose it's some rotten practical joke; if so, I would give something to lay hands on the joker!'

His father was still the only one of us he seemed to see, or could bring himself to face in his distress. Not that young Garland had the appearance of one who had been through fresh vicissitudes; on the contrary, he looked both trimmer and ruddier than overnight; and in his sudden fit of passionate indignation, twice the man that one remembered so humiliated and abased.

Raffles came forward from the fireside.

'There are some of us,' said he, 'who won't be so hard on the beggar for bringing you back from Lord's at last! You must remember that I'm the only one here who has been up there at all, or seen anything of you all day.'

Their eyes met; and for one moment I thought that Teddy Garland was going to repudiate this cool suggestio falsi, and tell us all where he had really been; but that was now impossible without giving Raffles away, and then there was his Camilla in evident ignorance of the disappearance which he had expected to find common property. The double circumstance was too strong for him; he took her hand with a confused apology which was not even necessary. Anybody could see that the boy had burst among us with eyes for his father only, and thoughts of nothing but the report about his health; as for Miss Belsize, she looked as though she liked him the better for it, or it may have been for an excitability rare in him and rarely becoming. His pink face burnt like a flame. His eyes were brilliant; they met mine at last, and I was warmly greeted; but their friendly light burst into a blaze of wrath as almost simultaneously they fell upon his bugbear in the background.

'So you've kept your threat, Mr. Levy!' said young Garland, quietly enough once he had found his voice.

'I generally do,' remarked the money-lender, with a malevolent laugh.

'His threat!' cried Mr. Garland sharply. 'What are you talking about, Teddy?'

'I will tell you,' said the young man. 'And you, too!' he added almost harshly, as Camilla Belsize rose as though about to withdraw. 'You may as well know what I am—while there's time. I got into debt—I borrowed from this man.'

'You borrowed from him?'

It was Mr. Garland speaking in a voice hard to recognise, with an emphasis harder still to understand; and as he spoke he glared at Levy with new loathing and abhorrence.

'Yes,' said Teddy; 'he had been pestering me with his beastly circulars every week of my first year at Cambridge. He even wrote to me in his own fist. It was as though he knew something about me and meant getting me in his clutches; and he got me all right in the end, and bled me to the last drop as I deserved. I don't complain so far as I'm concerned. It serves me right. But I did mean to get through without coming to you again, father! I was fool enough to tell him so the other day; that was when he threatened to come to you himself. But I didn't think he was such a brute as to come to-day!'

'Or such a fool?' suggested Raffles, as he put a piece of paper into

Teddy's hands.

It was his own original promissory note, the one we had recovered from Dan Levy in the morning. Teddy glanced at it, clutched Raffles by the hand, and went up to the money-lender as though he meant to take him by the throat before us all.

'Does this mean that we're square?' he asked hoarsely.

'It means that you are,' replied Dan Levy.

'In fact it amounts to your receipt for every penny I ever owed you?'

'Every penny that you owed me, certainly.'

'Yet you must come to my father all the same; you must have it both ways—your money and your spite as well!'

'Put it that way if you like,' said Levy, with a shrug of his massive shoulders. 'It isn't the case, but what does that matter so long as you're 'appy?'

'No,' said Teddy through his teeth; 'nothing matters now that I've come back in time.'

'In time for what?'

'To turn you out of the house if you don't clear out this instant!'

The great gross man looked upon his athletic young opponent, and folded his arms with a guttural chuckle.

'So you mean to chuck me out, do you?'

'By all my gods, if you make me, Mr. Levy! Here's your hat; there's the door; and never you dare to set foot in this house again.'

The money-lender took his shiny topper, gave it a meditative polish with his sleeve, and actually went as bidden to the threshold of the porch; but I saw the suppression of a grin beneath the pendulous nose, a cunning twinkle in the inscrutable eyes, and it did not astonish me when the fellow turned to deliver a Parthian shot. I was only surprised at the harmless character of the shot.

'May I ask whose house it is?' were his words, in themselves notable chiefly for the aspirates of undue deliberation.

'Not mine, I know; but I'm the son of the house,' returned Teddy truculently, 'and out you go!'

'Are you so sure that it's even your father's house?' inquired Levy with the deadly suavity of which he was capable when he liked. A groan from Mr. Garland confirmed the doubt implied in the words.

'The whole place is his,' declared the son, with a sort of nervous scorn—'freehold and everything.'

'The whole place happens to be mine—'freehold and everything!'' replied Levy,