In his capacity of doctor, pending the arrival of a successor to the late official, Paul had access to the prisons, and he questioned all newcomers cautiously for news. But in this the utmost care was necessary, for his position was utterly irregular and in flagrant contravention of all official rules. It was dependent on the caprice of a man who had every reason to regard him as an obstacle in his path. It was only the general fear of a further outbreak of the terrible prison scourge, which permitted him to exercise his profession at all. For typhus is no respecter of uniforms, and when once it got loose there was no knowing where it would stop. Colonel Zazarin dropped in occasionally to see if Madame Palma was sickening of life at Kara; the gendarmes called at least once every day, as they did at the house of every out-prisoner, to see that they were still there; and of friendlier visitors she had no lack. But at times Hope Palma's heart grew so weary of this shadowed waiting, that she came to feel, at last, that news of any kind, even the worst, would be better than no news at all. CHAPTER XVI HOW THEY SAT SIDE BY SIDE WITH A GULF BETWEEN One day, as winter was drawing towards the spring, Pavlof received a customary order to inspect a convoy of newly-arrived prisoners. Since the epidemic of the previous year the officials had exercised unusual precautions, more with a view, however, to their own safety than from any special care for the rest. These entailed no expenditure of money and little trouble for themselves. Each convoy as it arrived was carefully inspected, for life in the _étapes_ was an inducement to disease. To one who had passed through those hotbeds of vice and infection himself, it seemed a miracle that any could possibly come through uncontaminated. The authorities at St. Petersburg--busy just then with more important matters--had taken no slightest notice of the Governor's request for a successor to the late medical officer. So Pavlof, in the exercise of his duties, subjected every arrival, male and female, to careful examination, and promptly isolated every suspicious case. With a view to the utilisation of waste material, they were tended in hospital by female prisoners of some standing, under the distant but arbitrary oversight of Cossack sentries, whose natural density led them at times to interfere between nurses and patients when neither had dreamt for a moment of overstepping the most rigid disciplinary bounds. But they were, for the most part, dull-witted, low-browed, bullet-headed fellows, whose narrow understandings were capable of little beyond the fact that these were prisoners and they their warders. Coarse-grained by nature, their feelings had become pachyderm through constant contact with suffering humanity, and their highest aspirations might safely have been packed into a glass of vodka.