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E.W.Hornung

A Thief in the Night: a Book of Raffles' Adventures

  • b5715170792has quoted3 years ago
    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.
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    "I missed Achilles hours ago," said he. "And still he's sulking in his tent!"
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    I looked at the curly head upon
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    It was Raffles I loved. It was not the dark life we led together, still less its base rewards; it was the man himself, his gayety, his humor, his dazzling audacity, his incomparable courage and resource.
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    "What about the window-fastenings?" asked Raffles casually.
    I recoiled from the open cigarette-case that he proffered as he spoke. Our eyes met; and in his there was that starry twinkle of mirth and mischief, that sunny beam of audacious devilment, which had been my undoing two months before
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    her people called it "an understanding," and frowned even upon that, as well they might.
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    and afterward turned to Raffles in my need. Even after that I saw her sometimes.
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    their authority was not direct;
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    There have been private reasons for my reticence.
  • ksynonymhas quoted8 years ago
    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.
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