I strained my ears, but could hear no sound save that of someone moving within. No word was uttered, or if so, it was whispered so low that it did not reach me. For nearly five minutes I waited in impatience outside that closed door, until again the handle turned and my conductress beckoned me in silence within. I stepped into a small, square chamber, the floor of which was carpeted, and where, suspended high above, was a lamp that shed but a faint light over the barely-furnished place. It seemed to me to be a kind of sitting-room, with a plain deal table and a couple of chairs, but there was no stove, and the place looked chill and comfortless. Beyond was another smaller room into which the old nun disappeared for a moment; then she came forth leading a strange wan little figure in a gray gown, a figure whose face was the most perfect and most lovely I had ever seen. Her wealth of chestnut hair fell disheveled about her shoulders, and as her hands were clasped before her she looked straight at me in surprise as she was led towards me. She walked but feebly, and her countenance was deathly pale. Her dress, as she came beneath the lamp, was, I saw, coarse, yet clean, and her beautiful, regular features, which in her photograph had held me in such fascination, were even more sweet and more matchless than I had believed them to be. I stood before her dumbfounded in admiration. In silence she bowed gracefully, and then looked at me with astonishment, apparently wondering what I, a perfect 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.