"He would get away in the early spring. It might take him some months to get back to Russia. He would strike up north, which would make it longer but safer. Then he would seek you first. Where would he learn that you had come out after him?" "Old Masha would tell him that, if he found her." "He would seek her at once when he could not find you. Where would she be?" "I had to send her back to her people in Old Khersonese. They had been very good to me when I was ill--when my baby was born." "Ah--God, yes!"--with a face full of sympathy--"I did not dare to ask you, Hope Ivanovna. Serge told me. What--did it----?" "He died. And I was glad. Such a dear little fellow! But when he was dead I knew it was best so." "It was very sore upon you, Hope Ivanovna." "It was hard to lose him, but I knew it was better for him, and so I did not mourn for him, and in my heart I have him always." It was only round the stove at night, however, that they had time for disjointed conversation, or, as the case might be, for brooding thought. Pavlof was working energetically with brain and hand to stamp out the hidden germs of typhus from the prison kameras--as far as that was possible without burning the whole place down. It was an almost impossible task. Hercules himself would have given it up in despair and applied the cleansing flame. He talked hard and worked harder. But the Governor, absolute as were his powers over his prisoners, would not authorise the expenditure of a single rouble on sanitary matters without express permission from headquarters. Roubles were none too plentiful and had to be accounted for to the last kopeck. Men and women were sent there because they were superfluous. As Zazarin tersely put it. "Lives are cheap, but money is always dear. If we tell them a man is dead that ends it, but roubles never die, and we have to account for them." And Hope had the housework to attend to, and, since it was but a small house, and she had much time and a natural instinct for neatness and making the most of things, she brought and kept it up to such a high plane of comfort that Paul Pavlof hardly knew himself in it. Comfortable, in a way, it always had been under Madame Roskova's rough-and-ready housekeeping, but Anna Vassilievna's time had always been subject to many outside calls from the sick and needy ones, which had not yet fallen upon the newcomer, and--well, Hope's ideas of comfort went further than Anna Vassilievna's. Pavlof was so full of his Augean labours that he must discuss them with her of a night, and Hope rejoiced in the new element as a relief from the tension of those long brooding silences, which at times became beyond endurance painful.