In the first place, I found that the accused persisted that he was not Richard Hanford, but John Ferguson. He had been at the Cape for nearly two years, so he had no one to whom he could refer in confirmation of his statement. He was very hazy as to his antecedents. He had prospered at the Cape, he admitted, but would not say that the money he now possessed had come to him by marriage; he would not admit that he was married at all to the lady who accompanied him, though it was proved that at the private hotel at which they resided they were known as Mr and Mrs Ferguson. The lady herself, being referred to, declined to say whether she was married or not; and when _she_ took up that position, I need not say that our chance of bringing home to him a charge of bigamy became poor indeed. Then there remained the charge of desertion, but that could scarcely be brought forward, seeing that the wife had been in prison, serving a term of two years, while he had been away at the Cape and had but recently returned, and so might be supposed not to know that she was alive. But the weaker Janet Hanford’s case grew, the more determined and desperate she seemed to become. John Ferguson’s wife had a maid-servant to attend her, and Janet Hanford appears to have taken to watching the girl. One forenoon, when the case was at its most critical point—that is, when there were evidences that John Ferguson and his wife would soon be out of the country—the broken wife saw this girl leave the hotel with two letters in her hand. The girl walked rapidly along Princes Street, with the intention of posting them at the General Post Office; but before she had gone two divisions, Janet Hanford became a highway robber, by snatching the letters from her hand and vanishing like magic. One of the letters was addressed to “Master Frederick Hanford,” at a boarding-school some miles from the city; and almost before the amazed girl got back to her master, Janet Hanford was in a railway carriage and speeding towards that school. The letter she had stolen proved beyond a doubt that John Ferguson was Richard Hanford, and father of the boy, and also revealed the fact that it had been Hanford’s intention to remove the boy in a day or two, as he was “leaving the country.” Janet Hanford stopped all that by taking a policeman with her, and demanding that the boy—who readily recognised her as his mother—should be delivered up to her. The grief and consternation of the father were terrible to behold, and we had now the singular case of two persons charging each other with a crime, and each demanding the other’s arrest.