Leah was nonplussed. She was manufacturing conversation, and his comments were trivial, if not ironical, as she shrewdly suspected. She could not quite arrive at his real meaning. He avoided answering leading questions, and would neither accept not decline her asseverations. "I have no more to say," she remarked, with an air of one washing her hands of the whole affair. Again a deadly silence ensued; again she heard the heavy breathing of the creature hidden under the heaped blankets; again sounded the drowsy lapping of the water and the faint sigh of the wind. This time she resolved to make him speak, so that she might learn precisely what he thought. But the moments passed and no speech came. Finally it did come, in the unemotional voice of one who speaks in his sleep. He discoursed on a subject about which she had no desire to hear. "Paris--Havre--Kronstadt!" said the slow, drawling, monotonous tone, "and then the weary journey across the Urals. Oh, the cold and the snows and the bitter storms of Siberia! Chains and hunger, dirt and rags; and always--always--the hopeless future. None loved me; none lifted me up; none spoke words of kindness. Loneliness and sorrow and the constant torment of painful memories." The voice died away in a sob. Leah, desperately anxious to defend herself still further, would have spoken. But her mouth was dry; her lips ached; tremors thrilled her body as the nerves twittered, jumped, and quivered. Over the low bunk she could see the rocking stars as the vessel swung to her anchor. What glimmer of light there was revealed faintly the piled blankets, and nothing more. The face was veiled by almost material shadows. And again, drearily and heavily, rose the thick, muddy voice, without variance in its tones, without the music of feeling. It might have been, and probably was, a voice from the tomb, as it surged sluggishly through the fetid gloom. "St. Petersburg," announced the toneless voice, "Moscow, and the farce of a trial. The waving of a white-gloved hand, and a courtly bow, to dismiss me into pain and darkness and to a living grave. Nijni-Novgorod, and Mother Volga, who takes us convicts to her breast."