She took the pencil, and holding it in her white fingers sat staring first at us, and then looking hesitatingly at the white paper before her.  Her position, amid a hundred conflicting emotions, was one of extreme difficulty.  It seemed as though even now she was loth to reveal to us the absolute truth.

Muriel, standing behind her chair, tenderly stroked back the wealth of chestnut hair from her white brow.  Her complexion was perfect, even though her face was pale and jaded, and her eyes heavy, consequent upon her long, weary journey from the now frozen North.

Presently, when by signs both Jack and Olinto had urged her to write, she bent suddenly, and her pencil began to run swiftly over the paper.

All of us stood exchanging glances in silence, neither looking over her, but each determined to wait in patience until the end.  Once started, however, she did not pause.  Sheet after sheet she covered.  The silence for a long time was complete, broken only by the rapid running of the pencil over the rough surface of the paper.  She had apparently become seized by a sudden determination to explain everything, now that she saw we were in real, dead earnest.

I watched her sweet face bent so intently, and as the firelight fell across it found it incomparable.  Yes; she was afflicted by loss of speech, it was true, yet she was surely inexpressibly sweet and womanly, peerless above all others.

With a deep-drawn sigh she at last finished, and, her head still bowed in an attitude of humiliation, it seemed, she handed what she had written to me.

In breathless eagerness I read as follows: 

“Is it true, dear love—­for I call you so in return—­that you were impelled towards me by the mysterious hand that directs all things?  You came in search of me, and you risked your life for mine at Kajana, therefore you have a right to know the truth.  You, as my champion, and the Princess as my friend, have contrived to effect my freedom.  Were it not for you, I should ere this have been on my way to Saghalien, to the tomb to which Oberg had so ingeniously contrived to consign me.  Ah! you do not know—­you never can know—­all that I have suffered ever since I was a girl.”

Here the statement broke off, and recommenced as follows: 

“In order that you should understand the truth, I had better begin at the beginning.  My father was an English merchant in Petersburg, and my mother, Vera Bessanoff, who, before her marriage with my father, was celebrated at Court for her beauty, and was one of the maids-of-honor to the Czarina.  She was the only daughter of Count Paul Bessanoff, ex-Governor of Kharkoff, and before marrying my father she had, with her mother, been a well-known figure in society.  Immediately after her marriage her father died, leaving her in possession of an ample fortune, which, with my father’s own wealth, placed them among the richest and most influential in Petersburg.