"What, then?" she asked, startled. For trouble inside the prison had more than once sent ripples over the high stockade, and had led to general restrictions and a tightening of bonds. "Razin has gone too far. He has nagged and bullied till they are desperate. They have declared a hunger-strike, and some of them are not in condition to stand much of it." "Da! That is bad. Who is in it?" He named a dozen or so, and at mention of some of them Madame broke out into expressions of pity. "Da! They will die," she said forebodingly. "No one knows what it is like till they have been through it. We tried it once in the women's kamera at Irkutsk. They took away all our underclothing, that we had bought with our own money too, and made us wear convict clothes. And they took away our mats and made us sleep on the bare boards, and they threatened to whip us. So we struck, and sometimes of a night I find myself lying in the cold and dark again, and not a scrap of food inside my lips for ten days. And mostly we were very still. The silence was like the coming of death, only full of agonies at first. And some of us moaned, though it was a point of honour among us not to, and one night I bit my finger nearly through and sucked the blood to keep myself quiet. Ah God! a terrible, terrible time! And I am sorry for them." "And how did it end?" asked Hope, anxiously horrified. "Oh, they gave way when two of us died. It was the fourteenth day, I heard afterwards. We lost count ourselves. You see, we just lay day and night without moving, and there was nothing to mark the time. We beat them," she said, with a gleam in her kind eyes, "but it was very terrible," and sat, hands in lap, unusually idle, brooding over the thought of it. So deeply did their minds become engaged upon this matter that, for the moment, their personal concerns fell into the background, and Hope had time to accustom herself, unwatched, to the innumerable little awkwardnesses of the false position into which fate had cast her. Pavlof almost lived in the prison, but refused to sleep there. The kameras at night are unwholesome at best, and he did not consider the scattered huts of the Free Command wholesome places for women to sleep alone in. So he always came home to them sooner or later, and brought with him the shadow of the silent struggle which was going on behind the grim teeth of the great stockade. He told them briefly of the grievous suffering patiently endured, for the agonies come first, and are followed by the lethargy which, failing respite, sinks quietly into death. He told them, as the days passed, of the growing discomfort of the authorities. The strikers demanded the dismissal of the infamous Razin, in addition to the restitution of their abrogated privileges.