Too ready a compliance on the part of the governor would be equivalent to the hanging of a sword above his head for similar emergencies; too late a compliance meant loss of life and trouble with the authorities at home. Colonel Zazarin was a man of wrath in those days, and it was dangerous to approach him. He would endeavour to strike the happy mean--happy, that is, for himself, but a lengthening horror for the rest--by yielding to the prisoners' demands when, in his opinion, they had purchased the right with a sufficiency of suffering. The risk lay in missing the psychological moment when the scale should stand on the even balance between life and death, and on Pavlof, as acting medico, was laid the heavy responsibility of deciding when that moment had arrived. Day after day he spent in the gloomy kameras, gloomier now than ever, with death in its grimmest form hanging over them, waiting with the patience of the inevitable till the time should come to drop silently and finally down. Several times each day he registered the falling temperatures and weakening pulses of the sufferers, suffering much himself in all that they endured. More than once he urged Zazarin to step down and save them. But in Zazarin's judgment the malcontents had not yet suffered enough, and he held grimly aloof. For the doctor being a prisoner himself, Zazarin took measure of him by himself, believed that he would magnify the risks, and so discounted all his representations. Night after night Pavlof came home with gloomier face; and, full of the bitter thoughts his reports evoked in her, Anna Roskova went about her duties in the silence of a deeply touched soul which knows and understands. Her critical eye no longer troubled itself with the shortcomings of this most curious married couple. Death was abroad, nay, close at hand, and this was no time for hypercriticism of abnormal curiosities among the living. So, through the tension without and the sufferings of many, Hope's personal troubles were lightened somewhat, and her mind had little time to dwell on itself for thought of those others lying in the deepening gloom of the kameras till death should set them free. The respite was grateful to her, though the indirect cause of it shocked and wounded her sorely. Madame Roskova questioned Paul minutely as to the symptoms of his patients each night, and lived again her own bitter experience in his telling of them. "You will lose some of them, Serge Petrovitch," she said, with gloomy emphasis, on the twelfth night of the strike. "I told Zazarin so yesterday. I have told him so twice to-day. Two or three are just on the line and may slip over at any time." "He is a brute. What does he say?" "He says that those who pull through will not forget it as long as they live." "He is right. It wouldn't be surprising if others besides did not forget it either. The only surprising thing about it is that a man like that has been allowed to live so long."