I therefore at once saw a difficulty.
Yet she promised to tell me the truth if I could but secure her release! A flood of recollections of the amazing mystery swept through my mind.

A thousand questions arose within me, all of which I desired to ask her, but there, in that noisome prison-house, it was impossible.

As I stood there a woman's shrill scream of excruciating pain reached me, notwithstanding those cyclopean walls.

Some unfortunate prisoner was, perhaps, being tortured and confession wrung from her lips.

I shuddered at the unspeakable horrors of that grim fortress.
Could I allow this refined defenseless girl to remain an inmate of that Bastille, the terrors of which I had heard men in Russia hint at with bated breath?
They had willfully maimed her and deprived her of both hearing and the power of speech, and now they intended that she should be driven mad by that silence and loneliness that must always end in insanity.
"I have decided," I said suddenly, turning to the woman who had conducted me there, and having now removed the steel bonds of the prisoner with a key she secretly carried, stood with folded hands in the calm attitude of the religious.
"You will not act with rashness ?" she implored in quick apprehension.
"Remember, your life is at stake, as well as my own." "Her enemies intended that I, too, should die!" I answered, looking straight into those deep mysterious brown eyes which held me as beneath a spell.