I noticed that her great brown eyes watched my lips and not my face.

Her own lips moved, but she looked at me with an inexpressible sadness.  No sound escaped her.

I stood rigid before her as one turned to stone, for in that instant, in a flash indeed, I realized the awful truth.

She was both deaf and dumb!

She raised her clasped hands to me in silence, yet with tears welling in her splendid eyes.

I saw that upon her wrists were a pair of bright steel gyves.

“What is this place?” I demanded of the woman in the religious habit, when I recovered from the shock of the poor girl’s terrible affliction.  “Where am I?”

“This is the Castle of Kajana—­the criminal lunatic asylum of Finland,” was her answer.  “The prisoner, as you see, has lost both speech and hearing.”

“Deaf and dumb!” I cried, looking at the beautiful original of that destroyed photograph on board the Lola.  “But she has surely not always been so!” I exclaimed.

“No.  I think not always,” replied the sister quietly.  “But you said you intended to question her, and did I not tell you that to learn the truth was impossible?”

“But she can write responses to my questions?” I argued.

“Alas! no,” was the old woman’s whispered reply.  “Her mind is affected.  She is, unfortunately, a hopeless lunatic.”

I looked straight into those sad, wide-open, yet unflinching brown eyes utterly confounded.

Those white wrists held in steel, that pale face and blanched lips, the inertness of her movements, all told their own tragic tale.  And yet that letter I had read, dictated in secret most probably because her hands were not free, was certainly not the outpourings of a madwoman.  She had spoken of death, it was true, yet was it not to be supposed that she was slowly being driven to suicide?  She had kept her secret, and she wished the man Hornby—­the man who was to marry Muriel Leithcourt—­to know.

The room in which we stood was evidently an apartment set apart for her use, for beyond was the tiny bedchamber; yet the small, high-up window was closely barred, and the cold bareness of the prison was sufficient indeed to cause anyone confined there to prefer death to captivity.

Again I spoke to her slowly and kindly, but there was no response.  That she was absolutely dumb was only too apparent.  Yet surely she had not always been so!  I had gone in search of her because the beauty of her portrait had magnetized me, and I had now found her to be even more lovely than her picture, yet, alas! suffering from an affliction that rendered her life a tragedy.  The realization of the terrible truth staggered me.  Such a perfect face as hers I had never before set eyes upon, so beautiful, so clear-cut, so refined, so eminently the countenance of one well-born, and yet so ineffably sad, so full of blank unutterable despair.

She placed her clasped hands to her mouth and made signs by shaking her head that she could neither understand nor respond.  I therefore took my wallet from my pocket and wrote upon a piece of paper in a large hand the words:  “I come from Lydia Moreton.  My name is Gordon Gregg.”