The sister barred the door, urging me to reconsider my decision.

“Leave her alone in secret, and act as you will, appeal to the Baron, to the Czar, but do not attempt, m’sieur, to rescue a prisoner from here, for it is an impossibility.  The man who brought you here from Abo will not dare to accept such responsibility.”

“Come,” I said to Elma, although, alas! she could not hear my voice.  “Let us at least make a dash for freedom.”

She recognized my intentions in a moment, and allowed herself to be conducted down the long intricate corridor, walking stealthily, and making no noise.

I had seized the old horn lantern, and as the nun held back, not daring to accompany us, we stole on alone, turning back along the stone corridor until I recognized the door of the room to which I had been first conducted.  All was silent, and as we crept along on tiptoe I felt the girl’s grip upon my arm, a grip that told me that she placed her faith in me as her deliverer.

I own that it was a rash and headstrong act, for even beyond the lake how could we ever hope to penetrate those interminable inhospitable forests, so far from any hiding-place.  Yet I felt it my duty to attempt the rescue.  And besides, had not her marvelous beauty enmeshed me; had I not felt by some unaccountable intuition at the first moment we had met that our lives were linked in the future?  She clung to me as though fearful of discovery, as we went forward in silence along that dark, low corridor where I knew the strong door in the tower opened upon the lake.  Once in the boat, and we could row back to where the horses awaited us, and then away.  The woman had not arrested our progress or raised an alarm, after all.  Once I had mistrusted her, but I now saw that her heart was really filled with pity for the poor girl now at my side.

Without a sound we crept forward until within a few yards from that unlocked door where the boat awaited us below, when, of a sudden, the uncertain light of the lantern fell upon something that shone and a deep voice cried out of the darkness in Russian—­

“Halt! or I fire!”

And, startled, we found ourselves looking down the muzzle of a loaded carbine.

A huge sentry stood with his back to the secret exit, his dark eyes shining beneath his peaked cap, as he held his weapon to his shoulder within six feet of us.

The big, bearded fellow demanded fiercely who I was.

My heart sank within me.  I had acted recklessly, and had fallen into the hands of his Excellency, the Baron Xavier Oberg, the unscrupulous Governor-General—­fallen into a trap which, it seemed, had been very cleverly prepared for me.

I was a prisoner in the terrible fortress whence no single person save the guards had ever been known to emerge—­the Bastille of “The Strangler of Finland!”

I saw I was lost.

The muzzle of the sentry’s carbine was within two feet of my chest.