But it was not so with Hope, and Pavlof got many an amazing sight into the sealed book, and learned more of women's ways than most men learn in a lifetime. For he had his regular duties outside which kept his highest faculties alert and active. And she had too much time for painful thought, and, to a woman of Hope Palma's nature, the very fact of having to live and act so flagrant a lie as circumstances had forced her into, was to her feelings as the rasping of a file on a raw wound. At times her heart grew sick with the weary indefiniteness of it all. She said to herself that she might wait and wait for ever, and waiting is the hardest work in the world. Then, when the fit was on her, she would break out, as she brooded over the fire of a night-- "Is this to go on for ever? Shall we ever hear from him?" In their private intercourse she had come to discard the use of any appellation when addressing him. It lent a curtness to her speech which was foreign to her, but he understood her feeling, and suffered it without resentment. Paul Ivanuitch she must not call him, and Serge Petrovitch felt to her each time like a fresh endorsement of the lie that troubled her. "We shall hear in time, Hope Ivanovna." "You say it and say it, but shall we?"--defiantly. "Suppose we never hear?" "Then--but we shall hear, Hope Ivanovna. There has barely been time yet for word to come, even if he got through at once. If I could shorten the time for you I would, but I cannot." "It breaks my heart to think of him searching and searching and finding nothing, and wondering what has become of me." "It is very sore for you, but we are doing the only thing possible." "In the spring I will join a convoy and go back and look for him." "If you think well," he would answer gloomily. "But where you would look I do not know. He might well be on his way back here in some guise or other, and then you would pass him on the road." "You do not want me to go," she would fling at him. "I would give my life to serve you, Hope Ivanovna. But I could not counsel you to go in search of him, for I fear it would be fruitless. He promised to let me know in such a way that no censor could guess what he meant. The moment we hear I will do everything in my power to further your going. Till then you are safest here, and I think Serge would have it so." At other times she would fall into such a state of dull depression that Pavlof could hardly get a word out of her, and then he went gloomily, and watched anxiously for a recrudescence of the sickness from which she had suffered at Irkutsk. But it was heart-sickness that at such times made the body seem sick, and she would not allow him to doctor her.