The physician then proceeded to relate the manner in which Rainford had drawn Jeffreys into his service,--the revelations made to him by that individual’s unfolding all the dreadful schemes of vengeance contemplated by Old Death, and directed against the happiness of the Earl himself,--the projected exhumation of the coffin in Saint Luke’s church-yard, and the ferocious idea of blinding Lady Hatfield and Esther de Medina,--the mode in which these diabolical aims were frustrated by the arrest of all the members of Old Death’s gang,--and the faithful conduct of Jeffreys. Dr. Lascelles also narrated the proceedings of Rainford in the difficult affair of Mr. Torrens,--how, disguised as an old man, and admirably sustaining that character, he had entrapped Sir Christopher Blunt to the house in Red Lion Street to preside at the examination of the two prisoners,--and how he (Dr. Lascelles) had become a party to that transaction,--all of which particulars are well known to the reader. Finally, the physician made the Earl acquainted with the nature and the results of the system of reformation applied to all the members of the gang,--how it had succeeded in respect to Tidmarsh, the Bunces, Pedler and Splint,--and how Esther de Medina had deputed her unfortunate sister to visit Benjamin Bones on that fatal evening which was characterised by a savage murder! There was only one point connected with Rainford’s affairs, on which the Earl and the physician did not touch; and this was the parentage of little Charley Watts. The doctor was unacquainted with the fact that Rainford had some years back forcibly violated the person of Lady Hatfield, and that the issue of this crime was the boy who still bore the name by which we have just called him. The Earl of Ellingham naturally veiled the circumstance even from a friend so intimate and sincere as Lascelles; and though the doctor knew that Lady Hatfield had been a mother, he also kept this knowledge to himself, and was very far from suspecting the true history of Charley Watts. Lascelles, it will be remembered, had made the discovery relative to Georgiana on that occasion when he attended her in her severe illness, and when he gave her a soporific, as recorded in the early part of this work: but he had never mentioned that discovery to a soul;--and the Earl of Ellingham was as far from supposing that Lady Hatfield’s loss of chastity was known to the physician, as the physician was from entertaining even the remotest idea relative to the parentage of the boy.