t 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."

"The doctor wouldn't have him moved," he said, opening a closed door in
a long passage full of doors, the rest of which stood open. "It's not
reg'lar to have him in here, sir, I know; but the doctor wouldn't have
him moved."

Charles passed through the door, and found himself in a narrow
whitewashed cell, with a bed at one side, over which an old woman in the
dress of a hospital nurse was b