Morning brought no relief to their anxieties and they started at once for Odessa--and beyond: started at one black day's notice on a quest that led beyond their wildest imaginings. When Hope and old Marya, pale and heavy-eyed from their night of sleepless anxiety, reached their home on the cliff overlooking Quarantine Harbour, they found it in possession of the police. As to the why and wherefore of so summary a proceeding, or the whereabouts of the master, no information whatever was vouchsafed them, nor could their utmost endeavours procure any. Palma had been arrested. That was all they learnt, but it was more than enough. Hope, forlorn and desolate, but driven to desperate daring by her fears, sought the new chief of police in his office. He flatly refused her any information whatever, and set his face like a flint against the pitiful appeal of hers. She sought light in her sudden overwhelming darkness among her husband's friends and acquaintances. But arrest under administrative process falls on the ordinary ties of friendship as sharp frost on flowers. Where even the suspicion of untrustworthiness is sufficient to land a man in Siberia, mere friendship affords but small salvage for the unfortunate who falls beneath the ban. It needs closer ties to stand the strain, and at times even these also fail him, and to all intents and purposes he is dead, yet lacking the rest and relief that death confers. While strength lasted her, Hope strove blindly with the powers of darkness. She wrote in desperate urgency to Paul Pavlof at Moscow, and got no reply. Then she failed suddenly, and old Marya carried her away, broken in spirit and feeble in body, to her own native village in Old Khersonese, and none too soon. There the old woman and her kin wrestled nobly with death for her, and by God's grace won the fight, she not caring one whit, and as fain to die as to live. But when the soft head of her baby boy lay at last against her feebly-beating heart, new strength and the desire for life ran through her, and she woke again to all the sadness of living. CHAPTER IV HOW ONE FOUND HIMSELF IN HADES This brief record deals with human emotions rather than with a too realistic detail of all the facts which excited them. Yet, since every deliberate act in life is fruit or flower of seedling thought, the planting and growth of these is worthy of observance. It is the sum of the small that makes the large, and a single word may plant the seed which, in its time, blossoms into fragrant action, and alters the courses of lives, and rounds life itself at last into its fullest beauty. We exercise our privilege, then--more fortunately than those chiefly concerned--and skip twelve dreary months, and pick up the threads once more inside one of the Imperial sheepfolds--the great stockade of the Tomsk convict-forwarding prison, three thousand miles from St. Petersburg, on the banks of muddy Tom.