And many a sigh she heaved as she wished herself in Hope's place and her own dear man in Serge Petrovitch's. How different things would have been between them! Ay, though the road had worn her to rags. For every scrap of her would have clung to his heart and drawn fresh life from it. Well, well! folks were built on very different lines and some of the lines were uncommonly queer ones. But worn out bodies revive more quickly than sick souls. Time came when the little inner room could no longer offer sanctuary to Hope's troubled modesty without provoking suggestion of perversity, and visibly returning strength left her no excuse for not joining the others. She had spun out the fine thread of her bodily weakness till it was threadbare, and persistence must obviously before long translate "I can't" into "I won't." She was looking forward with dread to the levelling of her defences, and the openness to attack to which the common routine of daily life in so circumscribed a sphere must expose her, when there came to her temporary relief one of those ghastly prison happenings which are possible only under the terrible irresponsibility of autocratic and bureaucratic power. The tension within the little hut was slackened by the counter-irritant without, but at a cost in bodily suffering to those chiefly concerned which brought home to Hope, in tragic fashion, the rigours of the _régime_ under which the community at Kara lived. CHAPTER XIII HOW HOPE GOT GLIMPSE OF HELL The Free Command at Kara was a community hybrid of the ticket-of-leave and exile systems. Prisoners who had served their terms in the prison or the mines without discredit were permitted to live outside, where and how they could, on condition that they did not leave the neighbourhood. Government made them a trifling allowance of a few pence a day, they were permitted to receive remittances from home if there was any one there able to send them, and they might supplement their meagre incomes within certain very narrow lines if they could find any means of doing so. Exercise of the professions was absolutely forbidden, and as most of them were professional men, or in training therefor, their hardships were many. Life in the Free Command was less like living death than the life of the prisons and the mines, but it was subject to many bitter trials, not the least of which was the constant and ruthless surveillance of their insolent Cossack guards. At any hour of the day or night the sheepdogs might walk in upon them to see that they were still there and plotting no mischief. More than once, Hope, lying listless in her little inner room, had been startled by the sudden intrusion of a coarse hairy face, surmounted by a fur shako, and two dull eyes, which glared stolidly at her and roved insolently round the room, and at last took themselves disappointedly away.