The Gift of the Emperor
I burst out laughing.
"You needn't be ashamed. You are doing the very thing I was rather hoping you were going to propose the other day on the river."
"You were hoping it?" said Raffles, with his eyes wide open. Indeed, it was his turn to show surprise, and mine to be much more ashamed than I felt.
"Yes," I answered, "I was quite keen on the idea, but I wasn't going to propose it."
"Yet you would have listened to me the other day?"
Certainly I would, and I told him so without reserve; not brazenly, you understand; not even now with the gusto of a man who savours such an adventure for its own sake, but doggedly, defiantly, through my teeth, as one who had tried to live honestly and failed. And, while I was about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that rec-
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