"By-the-way," he added, turning at the door, "he asked over and over again, while I was with him, to see you or Mr. Danvers. I'm sure I forget which, but I promised him I would mention it. Nearly slipped my memory, all the same. He said one of you had known him in his better days, at--Oxford, was it?" "What name?" asked Charles. "Stephens," replied the doctor. "He seemed to think you would remember him." "Stephens," said Charles, reflectively. "Stephens! I once had a valet of that name, and a very good one he was, who left my service rather abruptly, taking with him numerous portable memorials of myself, including a set of diamond studs. I endeavored at the time to keep up my acquaintance with him; but he took measures effectually to close it. In fact, I have never heard of him from that day to this." "That's the man, no doubt," replied the doctor. "He has--er--a sort of look about him as if he might have been in a gentleman's service once; seen-better-days-sort of look, you know." Charles said he should be at D---- in the course of the afternoon, and would make a point of looking in at the police-station; and a quarter of an hour later he was driving as hard as he could tear in Ralph's high dog-cart along the road to D----. It was a six-mile drive, and he slackened as he reached the straggling suburbs of the little town, lying before him in a dim mist of fine rain and smoke. Arrived at the dismal building which he knew to be the police-station, he was shown into a small room hung round with papers, where the warden was writing, and desired, with an authority so evidently accustomed to obedience that it invariably insured it, to see the prisoner. The prisoner, he said, at whose arrest he had been present, had expressed a wish to see him through the doctor; and as the warden demurred for the space of one second, Charles mentioned that he was a magistrate and justice of the peace, and sternly desired the confused official to show him the way at once. That functionary, awed by the stately manner which none knew better than Charles when to assume, led the way down a narrow stone passage, past numerous doors behind one of which a banging sound, accompanied by alcoholic oaths, suggested the presence of a freeborn Briton chafing under restraint. "I had him put up-stairs, sir," said the warden, humbly. "We didn't know when he came in as it was a case for the infirmary; but seeing he was wanted for a big thing, and poorly in his 'ealth, I giv' him one of the superior cells, with a mattress and piller complete." The man was evidently afraid that Charles had come as a magistrate to give him a reprimand of some kind, for, as he led the way up a narrow stone staircase, he continued to expatiate on the luxury of the "mattress and piller," on the superiority of the cell, and how a nurse had been sent for at once from the infirmary, when, owing to his own shrewdness, the prisoner was found to be "a hospital case."