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.