Delighted to find that his facetious mood made him so pliant, I obeyed him in every particular, and Peter’s exultant smile only faded when the first two or three questions had been put to him at the office. The moment “Sunderland” was mentioned his jaw fell, and he fixed upon me a look of hatred most flattering and pleasing to me. On searching the lining of Peter’s coat we came upon a flat packet of papers. There were some six or seven letters, and a properly authenticated certificate of marriage, all proving that Isabella Diamond had been courted and married some twenty years before by Matthew Bannister. Peter’s rage had been working up during the search, and he now shouted out that he knew who had set that “bloodhound,” as he was pleased to name myself, on his track, and after a burst of the most awful language, he wound up by accusing Mr Bannister of having two wives living, and commanding us to go and arrest the gentleman as smartly as we had arrested the rogue. When the papers had been discovered I fully expected to have that disagreeable task to perform. The whole case seemed clear and the proof positive to my mind, for I had seen the working of the hidden springs from the first. But the law has certain forms of its own; and I was sent first to Bell Diamond herself, who was the proper person to make the charge. To my surprise, though she gave vent to rage and vituperation over the capture of Peter, she most positively refused to charge Mr Bannister with bigamy; nay in the very face of the discovered papers she swore most positively that she had never been married in her life, and had never spoken to Mr Bannister. My firm conviction, upon hearing this extraordinary denial, was that Bell had a spark of generosity in her breast, low as she had fallen, and wished to save the man who had once loved her from the ignominy of a prison; but in that I was very far mistaken. Bell was actuated by a very different motive—a desire to get well out of an awkward plight and a very threatening complication. The secret was partly laid bare by referring to Mr Bannister, but it was not wholly made clear till long after. Mr Bannister had really married a girl named Isabella Diamond, who drifted away from him and was lost sight of. That lost wife, after sinking lower and lower, died in a lodging-house in Glasgow, in which Peter Hart and his sister at that time lived. Nelly Hart was in trouble and likely to be taken, and the name of the dead woman was boldly given in as Helen Hart, while the living owner took the name of Bell Diamond, as well as the papers left by her, and vanished in the direction of Edinburgh. There they remained for some time, till, by merest accident, they discovered that Mr Bannister was newly married, and conceived the plan of frightening him into paying black mail, under the idea that his lost wife was still alive.