Five thousand miles of travel hold certainties of discomfort under the best of conditions. Five thousand miles with convict convoys----! One shudders at the bare thought of it, when the mere sight of such a travelling party chills the heart and haunts the imagination for days. It is liberty and humanity at its lowest; Might trampling Right in the mud; the apotheosis of sheer brute force and, as often as not, of sheer brutality. You cannot get away from facts, and these things are. To any woman such a journey must needs have been packed with horrors. To one like Hope Palma, trained from her earliest days to the most vital sympathy with her burdened fellows, vicarious sufferer in all their woes, and suffering the more the more she knew and understood,--to Hope Palma those nightmare months of travel were like the brush of a vicious censor blotting out the brightness of life with a raw black smudge. But the brush of the censor obliterates the desirable, which still at times peeps tantalisingly through; and the things that would show through this venomous smudge were horrors which neither time nor will could efface. She had forced herself to the needs of that terrible journey by sheer force of will, and had the need continued she too would have endured. But, the necessity over, and the tight-strung nerves loosed, they lapsed in the recoil to a flaccidity quite abnormal. For many days she lay spent and spilled, and apparently careless of living, her one primal desire for quietness and solitude. Madame Roskova's kind heart craved much larger ministry, both bodily and mental, than was permitted it. She would have coaxed back and built up her patient's strength with cunning dishes, and reasoned her away from the past with assurances of present safety and comfort, and promises of future happiness. But Hope begged so plaintively to be allowed just to lie at rest that Madame could but comply. "Just to lie quiet, dear Madame Roskova, that is all I require. I have been sorely bruised, and healing is in quiet," said Hope. "Da!" said Madame. "I am glad I stayed. Perhaps, after all, you know best, child. When one is all unstrung like that one woman is worth ten men, even if one of them is one's husband and a doctor. I know!" Pavlof, too, began to fear that her health had suffered permanent injury through the trials and hardships of the road, but he knew also that the hardest blow of all had been the one that had fallen upon her just when she believed she had reached the goal of all her strenuous endeavour. He knew that a sick heart makes a sick body, and at risk of forfeiting the esteem of Madame Roskova, and greatly to the exercising of her mind, he judged it truest kindness to Hope to obtrude himself upon her as little as possible.