“At last the third bell that brought my deliverance rang at last, the train moved; we passed the prison, the barracks, came out into the open country, and yet, to my surprise, the feeling of uneasiness still persisted, and still I felt like a thief passionately longing to escape.  It was queer.  To distract my mind and calm myself I looked out of the window.  The train ran along the coast.  The sea was smooth, and the turquoise sky, almost half covered with the tender, golden crimson light of sunset, was gaily and serenely mirrored in it.  Here and there fishing boats and rafts made black patches on its surface.  The town, as clean and beautiful as a toy, stood on the high cliff, and was already shrouded in the mist of evening.  The golden domes of its churches, the windows and the greenery reflected the setting sun, glowing and melting like shimmering gold. . . .  The scent of the fields mingled with the soft damp air from the sea.

“The train flew rapidly along.  I heard the laughter of passengers and guards.  Everyone was good-humoured and light-hearted, yet my unaccountable uneasiness grew greater and greater. . . .  I looked at the white mist that covered the town and I imagined how a woman with a senseless blank face was hurrying up and down in that mist by the churches and the houses, looking for me and moaning, ’Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!’ in the voice of a little girl or the cadences of a Little Russian actress.  I recalled her grave face and big anxious eyes as she made the sign of the Cross over me, as though I belonged to her, and mechanically I looked at the hand which she had kissed the day before.

“‘Surely I am not in love?’ I asked myself, scratching my hand.

“Only as night came on when the passengers were asleep and I was left tete-a-tete with my conscience, I began to understand what I had not been able to grasp before.  In the twilight of the railway carriage the image of Kisotchka rose before me, haunted me and I recognised clearly that I had committed a crime as bad as murder.  My conscience tormented me.  To stifle this unbearable feeling, I assured myself that everything was nonsense and vanity, that Kisotchka and I would die and decay, that her grief was nothing in comparison with death, and so on and so on . . . and that if you come to that, there is no such thing as freewill, and that therefore I was not to blame.  But all these arguments only irritated me and were extraordinarily quickly crowded out by other thoughts.  There was a miserable feeling in the hand that Kisotchka had kissed. . . .  I kept lying down and getting up again, drank vodka at the stations, forced myself to eat bread and butter, fell to assuring myself again that life had no meaning, but nothing was of any use.  A strange and if you like absurd ferment was going on in my brain.  The most incongruous ideas crowded one after another in disorder, getting more and more tangled, thwarting each other, and I, the thinker, ‘with my brow