In the moonlight Strangemore lifted his dark, sad eyes, and looked drearily into Armstrong’s face. “Redeem myself--and Nina _dead_!” he said, reproachfully. Armstrong answered, impressively: “You made a terrible mistake in leaving your home as you did. Your wife is not _dead_.” “Not dead!” Strangemore shouted, hoarsely, and there was such a passion of joy and amazement in his voice that it touched a responsive chord of gladness in every manly breast. “Not dead,” John Armstrong answered, gravely, and solemnly. “But she needs your presence, Talbot Strangemore, for she is in the most terrible peril at the hands of the law. She is in prison now and condemned to be hanged on the 25th of July for the murder of her beautiful rival, Mrs. St. Alban!” CHAPTER XLV. TALBOT LEARNS ALL. Talbot Strangemore thought that he had suffered before, but no such terrible moment as this had ever come to him until now when John Armstrong’s words rang in his ears like the trump of doom. They struck him with all the suddenness of a dreadful blow, depriving him all at once of power, strength and volition. He reeled and staggered dizzily like one drunken, and if the men had not come to his assistance he would have fallen like one dead, to the earth. “You broke it to him too abruptly,” said Harvey Wilson, compassionately, as he brought water and bathed the face of the almost swooning man. “I am sorry, but I did not know that he would take it so hard,” Armstrong answered. “Did you think I had no soul and no conscience, then?” demanded Strangemore, glancing weakly up at him from the chair where they had placed him. “Oh, my God, sir, did you mean the horrible words you spoke to me, or was it but an unseemly jest?” “Unhappily it was the bitter truth, although had I been more discreet I might have chosen my words so as not to shock you so much. But I will not ask you to believe my unsupported testimony. I have with me some London and New York papers, containing the whole story.” He made a sign to his servant to unstrap his portmanteau, and bring the papers. Someone struck a light, and with a shaking hand Talbot Strangemore unfolded them. They rehearsed the whole tragic story, thrillingly. There could no longer be any doubt in his mind. His lovely girl-bride, Nina, whom he had so cruelly wronged and whom he thought had died the death of the suicide, had twice been saved from self-destruction only to meet a terrible doom upon the scaffold--dying for the crime of another. He crushed the papers fiercely in his hand and staggered past them to the place where Oswald Ferris still crouched, wild-eyed, and in mortal terror of his life. He bent down and hissed fiercely in the ear of the cowering wretch: “Did you hear what they were saying? Nina, my young wife, was not dead as we supposed. She lives--lives, do you hear?--And she is in prison, my innocent, pure-hearted darling--in prison, and condemned to be hung for the murder of Sibyl St. Alban!”