"Serge," he said, in an insistent whisper. "You must call me Serge. Try to remember, Hope Ivanovna." Here Madame Roskova came in with a steaming cup of tea, and the lamp replenished with neighbourly oil, and words of homely cheer such as she would have used to a sick child. "Da! That is better now! Drink this, my dear, and then come and thaw yourself before the stove. Nothing like a cup of hot tea when you're feeling down. And you have got the cold of five thousand miles in your bones, I expect. And now I must run across again to Marya Verskaïa as I promised----" "Don't go, Madame! Pray don't go!" cried Hope, almost hysterically. "Da, then! Marya will never forgive me if I don't, my dear," laughed Madame. "And by the time I get back you two will have found yourselves and we can talk things over comfortably." She still had on her cloak and hood from her late quest after oil, and now with a hearty "God with you!" she was gone. "Come out to the stove, Hope Ivanovna," said Paul gently. "You are frozen as Madame Roskova says." "My heart is frozen, I think, and my brain too," she said, as she dropped forlornly into the chair he placed for her, and sat gazing into the stove. And presently, as she began to recover from the first numbing shock, and her wits began to travel, she said, like the child repeating its half-forgotten lesson---- "Here you are Serge Palma! And I----! My God! My God! What shall I do?" as it all came upon her in a heap, and she sprang up wildly as though to go. "You must trust me, Hope Ivanovna," said Pavlof gently, and took and held one of the cold little hands. "Yes, yes! But----" "Listen again, Hope Ivanovna! If you will trust me all will be well. Here I am Serge Palma, and you----" "And I----?" as he hesitated, knowing so well the fine temper of her spirit. "For a time," he jerked hurriedly, "till we hear that Serge is clear, you will have to pass to the world as my wife. There is nothing else for it." "My wife!"--the very words roused tumult in his heart and sent the hot blood spinning through his veins at a gallop. Ah, if it could have been so! What a heaven the bare little hut would have become! He would have asked nothing else of God. But the words had a widely, wildly different effect on Hope. "Pass--as--your--wife!" and she sprang up, incarnate scorn, magnificent, blazing, scarifying--she who lay so brokenly in her chair but a moment before. "So this is the meaning of it all!"--and, if it had been, he had surely withered where he stood, scarce daring to raise his eyes to hers, lest she should see in them that which must be in them for her alone of all women in the world until he died. "It is for this you have planned and schemed and tricked? For this! Shame on you, Paul Pavlof!--to dupe a woman who would have trusted you with her life--and more!"