"You will find him better circumstanced than he might have been," said the Colonel. "And, curiously enough"--with a short laugh--"I feel under some obligation to him for having paved the way to my appointment here. They had a bad outbreak of typhus in the spring. The prisoners died like flies; the doctor died. Your husband offered to take his place"--at which Hope wondered much--"and under the circumstances he was allowed to do so"--at which she wondered still more--"though it was directly against the rules. Under his care the Governor died"--she did not feel much surprise at that.--"I do not say he would not have died in any case. Still your husband failed to keep him alive, and they pitched on me as his successor. I hesitated, I must confess. Then I decided to accept the appointment and---- Ah, here we are Madame!" They stood before a tiny house built of rough logs, with dim little windows, and long icicles hanging from the eaves. The Colonel opened the door, without knocking, and walked in. "The nest is empty," he said. "We will wait until the bird returns. I did not tell him you were coming, because one never knows what may happen, and to raise false hopes is a cruelty. It is not a palace," he said, with a shrug, "but it is better than a kamera inside the stockade." "It will be home," said Hope quietly, lest continued silence should provoke his resentment. "There is no accounting for tastes," he said, with another shrug and a depreciatory glance round, at the crude brick stove with its little core of heat in a bank of white ashes, the bare floor, the rude table, the couple of comfortless chairs. It was all harsh and cheerless, and might well have excited the distaste of even a more hardened campaigner than Colonel Zazarin. "I prefer it to St. Petersburg," said Hope, and Colonel Zazarin shrugged his absolute incomprehension of such a state of mind. "You could have been much more comfortable there, if you had chosen, my dear. I would have----" "Oh, don't! Pray don't! I beg of you!" And the Colonel shrugged again and kicked some snow off his boot against the stove. Perhaps the pitiful appeal of her strained white face was not entirely without its effect, upon even him. But, as her eyes tuned themselves by degrees to the obscurity, her heart began to flutter furiously again. It was in her throat. It was choking her. For, on the rough wooden shelf alongside the stove, stood a woman's workbasket, with some unmistakable woman's work thrown carelessly on top of it. Before the stove lay a pair of woman's slippers; from a hook hung a woman's gown; and to Hope's quickened eye there started out from the gloom--like accumulating evidences at a trial--a dozen other almost infinitesimal signs of female occupancy of the hut.