"Who's the friend you speak of?" asked Tom in an easy, off-hand kind of manner. "Sir Walter Ferguson," was the reply. "So come along." With these words, the stout man took Rainford's arm and led him away to the Police Court in Bow Street. Jacob, who was an unsuspected witness of the whole proceeding, immediately took the shortest way to Seven Dials. CHAPTER III. BOW STREET. The moment Mr. Dykes had lodged his prisoner in one of the cells attached to the court, he hurried off to Piccadilly Hill, and knocked loudly at the door of Lady Hatfield's residence. Upon explaining the nature of his business to the domestic who answered the summons, he was admitted into an apartment where Lady Hatfield and Miss Mordaunt almost immediately joined him. Lady Hatfield was the orphan daughter of the Earl and Countess of Mauleverer. She was an only child: the proud title of Mauleverer had become extinct with the demise of her father; but the family property had devolved to her. She was in her twenty-fifth year, and surpassingly beautiful:—the style of her loveliness was fascinating and intellectual—rendered the more interesting, too, by the tinge of melancholy which characterised her countenance. Her eyes were large and of a deep blue: the soul sate enthroned on her pale and lofty forehead;—her smile, though always plaintively mournful, denoted amiability and kindness. In stature she was of the middle height; and, though in the least degree inclining to _embonpoint_, yet the fulness of her form marred not its lightness nor its grace. The bust was rounded in voluptuous luxuriance—and the hips were expanded;—but the waist was naturally small—the limbs tapered gradually downwards—and her step was so elastic, while her gait was easy though dignified, that even the most critical judge of female attractions could not have found it in his heart to cavil at her symmetry. Miss Mordaunt was a lady who had seen thirty-five summers, although she would have gone into hysterics had any one suggested that such was really the fact. She was short, thin, and not particularly good-looking; for her hair was of so decided a red that it would have been a mockery instead of a compliment to term it auburn: her eyes were grey, and her nose suspiciously inclining to the species called "pug:"—but her complexion was good, her teeth well preserved and white, and her hand very beautifully formed. Thus, when she looked in her glass—which was as often as she passed near it—she mentally summed up the good and the bad points of her personal appearance, invariably striking a balance in favour of the first, and thence arriving at the very logical conclusion that she should yet succeed in escaping from a condition of single blessedness.