“I have ruined this town of Abo,” he declared, quite frankly.  “To my own knowledge five hundred innocent persons have gone to prison, and another two hundred have been exiled to Siberia.  Yet what I have done is only at direct orders from Helsingfors—­orders that are stern, pitiless and unjust.  Men have been torn from their families and sent to the mines, women have been arrested for no offense and shipped off to Saghalien, and mere children have been cast into prison on charges of political conspiracy with their elders—­in order to Russify the province!  Only,” he added anxiously, “I trust you will never repeat what I tell you.  You have asked me why I assisted the English Mademoiselle to escape from Kajana, and I have explained the reason.”

We ate a hearty meal in company at the Sampalinna, a restaurant built like a Swiss chalet, and at noon I entered the train on the first stage of my slow, tedious journey through the great silent forests and along the shores of the lakes of Southern Finland, by way of Tavestehus and Viborg, to Petersburg.

I was alone in the compartment, and sat moodily watching the panorama of wood and river as we slowly wound up the tortuous ascents and descended the steep gradients.  I had not even a newspaper with which to while away the time, only my own apprehensive thoughts of whither my helpless love was being conducted.

Surely to no man was there ever presented such a complicated problem as that which I was now trying so vigorously to solve.  I loved Elma Heath.  The more I reflected, the deeper did her sweet countenance and tender grace impress themselves upon my heart.  I loved her, therefore I was striving to overtake her.

The steamer, I learned, would call at Hango and Helsingfors.  Would they, I wonder, disembark at either of those places?  Was the man whom I had known as Hornby, the owner of the Lola, taking her to place her again in the fiendish hands of Xavier Oberg?  The very thought of it caused me to hold my breath.

Daylight came at last, cold and gray, over those dreary interminable marshes where game, especially snipe, seemed abundant, and at a small station at the head of a lake called Davidstadt I took my morning glass of tea; then we resumed our journey down to Viborg, where a short, thick-set Russian of the commercial class, but something of a dandy, entered my compartment, and we left express for Petersburg.

We had passed by a small station called Galitsina, near which were many villas occupied in summer by families from Petersburg, and were traveling through the dense gloomy pine-woods, when my fellow-traveler, having asked permission to smoke, commenced to chat affably.  He seemed a pleasant fellow, and told me that he was a wool merchant, and that he had been having a pleasant vacation trout fishing in the Vuoski above the falls of the Imatra, where the pools between the rapids abound with fish.

He had told me that on account of the shore being so full of weeds and the clearness of the water, fishing from the banks was almost an impossibility, and how they had to accustom themselves to troll from a boat so small as to only accommodate the rower and the fisherman.