A low, smothered execration came from the bearded lips of Oswald Ferris. “The papers have told my own story so plainly that I need scarcely rehearse it,” he said, with faint bitterness. “Sibyl and I had been lovers once in my college days when she was the poor professor’s daughter and I a student with a small income--so small that it did not tempt Sibyl to keep her troth to me when a richer man tempted her with his gold. She threw me over heartlessly, and I went home and married Nina Selwyn the little stepdaughter of my dying mother. I went abroad after my mother’s death and left my little child-bride in the care of my aunt. Three years later when I was thinking of returning to my home an evil chance threw me in Sibyl St. Alban’s way again!” “An evil chance for all,” muttered Oswald Ferris in his beard. “If I had not been a vain weak fool, nothing would have happened as it did then,” Talbot continued, bitterly. “I should have known better by my experience of the past, but I fell straight into the glamour of her toils again. She threw over the lover of whom I have spoken, as heartlessly as she had once done me. She ignored him as if he had never existed. He bore all in gloomy silence, but with inward rage and fierce resentment that was all the deeper because he bore his cruel injury in silence, brooding upon it when alone and yearning for revenge upon the heartless coquette who had ruined his peace of mind.” Instinctively every eye turned upon Oswald Ferris, and while they gazed upon his craven face Talbot Strangemore asked, with bitter emphasis: “Is it not more likely, gentlemen, that Sibyl St. Alban met her death at the hands of that enraged and vengeful lover than from the fair, weak girl whose jealousy was manifested with simple childish directness, not endured with the deep, silent cunning of the man’s vindictive nature?” He turned his flashing dark eyes upon their eager, interested faces, and instantly every man’s hand went up in the air, and every man’s voice answered in the affirmative. Oswald Ferris regarded the spirited demonstration with an uneasiness that he vainly strove to hide. He had seen the men’s eyes turned upon him in suspicion and distrust, and the terrible dread upon his mind grew greater every moment. He could not avoid saying, with a convulsive sneer: “Mr. Strangemore has omitted the most important fact in his whole story. Is the dying testimony of the murdered woman to be wholly disregarded? Sibyl St. Alban declared that Mrs. Strangemore killed her.”