The future is ever the outcome of the past, as every deed is the fruition of thought, conscious or otherwise. These dire happenings brought the travellers face to face, in the most abrupt and uncompromising fashion, with the great elemental facts of life and death; and close behind them, and interwoven with them, were the more complex perceptions of life in death and death in life. Their hearts were bruised and tender, their understandings were quickened to the mighty meanings of things. They spoke less now, as they tramped side by side, but thought the more, and the thoughts of both were continually of the woman they both loved, and of her desolation in her loneliness. Pavlof heard his friend murmur her name in his uneasy sleep. Once, as they tramped in silence, Palma broke out in unconscious utterance of his thoughts, "God! if I only knew that all was well with her!" and never knew that he had spoken. And Paul Pavlof, as he heard it, smiled to himself as he smiled of a night in the darkness of the kamera. There come a day at last when they passed between two great brick pillars, set up one on each side of the road. "What are these?" asked Palma. "We were in Tomsk. Now we are in Yeniseisk." "So!" and they went in silence and knew that the time drew near when they must part--one for the comparative freedom of the provinces, the other for the terrible tramp of two thousand rough miles to Kara, a dreary journey with a drearier ending. "You will do that which I asked of you, Paul Ivanuitch?" said Palma presently. "You will escape, and seek out my wife, and tell her all that is in my heart for her? ... My God! My God! what a pitiful wreck I have made of her life, and I had hoped so much for her!" "I will do what I can, Serge Petrovitch." And that night, as they lay side by side in the kamera, Pavlof said to him, "Are you sleeping, Serge Petrovitch?" "I cannot sleep." "Then draw your coat above your head and put it close to mine. So! Now, listen! To-morrow we reach Achinsk, and there we part company. You made me promise to do something for you, for the sake of Hope Ivanovna. Will you promise now to do something for me?" "Surely, Paul Ivanuitch! I will do anything you want." "Swear it!" "I swear it--if it is anything within my power." "It is within your power and you are pledged. Listen! When they call the roll in Achinsk you will answer to my name and I to yours. You will become Paul Pavlof. I shall become Serge Palma." "Good God, Paul Ivanuitch!--What----?" "You will go to the provinces in place of me." "But----" "You will wait till the cuckoo sings in the spring----" "But--Paul----" "And then you will walk away and strike north for the land of the Ostiaks"--he felt Palma's body shaking as with an ague. "You will be very cautious, for Hope Ivanovna's sake. And when you find her you will tell her that Paul Pavlof did his best to live up to her teaching."