Oswald Ferris shrank from the fiery lightning of his eyes, but he answered, sullenly: “Yes, I know. I heard it all.” “You heard it all? Then what have you to say?” demanded Talbot Strangemore, stormily. “I have nothing to say. What does it matter to me that your wife will have to swing for her crime?” Ferris answered, with the brutal laugh of a fiend in Hades. “Wretch! Coward! Liar!” Strangemore panted, springing toward him, and his two strong white hands leaped at the throat of Ferris and closed upon it with a strangling grasp. The face of the wretch grew swollen and livid, his fierce eyes seemed to start from his head, he uttered fearful inarticulate sounds of rage, fear, and suffering. Presently he grew still, and only a smothered gasp seemed to issue from his purple, foam-flecked lips. In a moment all would have been over, and his crime-stained soul would have been hurled unshriven at the judgment seat, but in that fateful moment the locked hands of Strangemore fell apart suddenly, and he reeled backward from the wretch with a cry that shrilled to the very heavens: “My God, am I gone mad with the horror of this night that I was about to sink my soul to the level of this fiend’s?” Ferris glared at him with sullen rage and relief. “Let there be no more talk of Judge Lynch, now. You have attempted my life, even as I did yours. We are quits, now,” he exclaimed. “No, we are not quits yet--never until I wring from your cursed cowardly lips the confession of the terrible crime for which my innocent young wife is condemned to suffer death!” Talbot Strangemore answered, with terrible wrath. CHAPTER XLVI. TALBOT ACCUSES FERRIS. Full of wonder and surprise the men gathered around them. They did not understand the new complication of affairs. “What is the meaning of this?” they asked, and Ferris answered with triumphant malice: “Strangemore attempted to choke me, and but for my superior strength with which I threw off the villain’s grasp I must have been a dead man now!” Talbot Strangemore looked at him with superb scorn, and hissed out the single word: “Liar!” “What, do you deny that you attempted to strangle me?” said Ferris, in pretended amazement and reproach. “I deny that I was prevented from doing so by any superior strength on your part. I simply desisted myself because I suddenly realized to what enormities my frenzy was driving me,” Talbot Strangemore answered, folding his arms across his broad breast, and looking at the man before him with proud, defiant scorn. Ferris laughed aloud, a low jarring gurgle of sarcastic ridicule. “You hear him, gentlemen of the jury,” he exclaimed. “It is a very plausible tale, is it not?” They gazed in wonder, scarce knowing what to say. All had witnessed the attack, but it was not easy to determine whether Strangemore had desisted himself or been forced to do so by the superior strength of the other.