ct stranger, required
of her.

"Miss Elma Heath, I presume?" I exclaimed at last. "May I introduce
myself to you? My name is Gordon Gregg, English by birth, cosmopolitan
by instinct. I have come here to ask you a question--a question that
concerns yourself. Lydia Moreton has sent me to you."

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 cap