“Here, here!” I said hastily, and pulled the money out of my pocket.  He did not take it, however, but continued to stare at me.  I put the ruble on the table.  He pushed it with one shove into the table-drawer, threw the watch to me, turned to the right about, and hissed at his wife and boy, “Away with you! get out!”

Uliana tried to stammer out a few words, but I was already outside the door on the street.  I dropped the watch into the bottom of my pocket, held it tight with my hand and hastened homeward.

VI.

I was again in possession of my watch, and yet it gave me no pleasure.  I could not wear it, and above everything I had to hide from David what I had done.  What would he have thought of me and of my lack of character?  I could not even put my watch in the drawer, for we kept all our things there in common.  I had to hide it—­at one time on the top of the wardrobe, at another under the mattress, again behind the stove; and yet I did not succeed in deceiving David.

Once I had taken the watch from under the planks of our floor, and was trying to polish its silver case with an old leather glove.  David had gone somewhere down town, and I did not think he was back when suddenly there he stood in the doorway!  I was so confused that I almost let the watch drop, and, my face hot with blushes, I felt despairingly for my waistcoat pocket to put my watch into it.  David looked at me and smiled in his silent way.  “What are you after?” he said at last.  “Did you think I didn’t know you’d got the watch again?  I saw it the first day you brought it back.”

“I assure you—­” I began with tears.

David shrugged his shoulders:  “The watch is yours:  you can do what you please with it.”

When he had said those hard words he went out.  I was overcome with mortification.  This time there was no doubt that David despised me.  That could not be borne.  “I will show him,” I said to myself, setting my teeth hard.  With a firm step I walked into the next room, where our servant Juschka was, and gave him the watch.  At first Juschka would not take it, but I declared to him that if he would not take the watch I would break it into pieces, trample it to powder, crush it to atoms.  He thought for a moment, and finally consented to take it.  When I came back to our room I found David reading a book.  I told him what I had done.  He did not lift his eyes from the page he was reading, but shrugged his shoulders again and said, “The watch is yours to do what you like with it.”  But it seemed to me as if he despised me a little less.  I was fully determined not again to lay myself open to the charge of having no character, for this watch, this hateful present of my hateful godfather, had become so detestable that I could not understand how I could ever have been sorry to lose it, how I could have brought myself to begging it from a man like Trofimytsch, and give him the right to believe that he had behaved generously to me in regard to it.