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.
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