After depositing Razumov at the gates of the Chateau Borel, some half a mile or so from the town, the car continued its journey between two straight lines of shady trees.  Across the roadway in the sunshine a short wooden pier jutted into the shallow pale water, which farther out had an intense blue tint contrasting unpleasantly with the green orderly slopes on the opposite shore.  The whole view, with the harbour jetties of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering quality of a very fresh oleograph.  Razumov turned his back on it with contempt.  He thought it odious—­oppressively odious—­in its unsuggestive finish:  the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture.  And turning his back on it, he faced the entrance to the grounds of the Chateau Borel.

The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron arch between the dark weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for a very long time.  But close against the lodge, built of the same grey stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small side entrance.  The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked as though it had not been closed for a long time.  In fact, Razumov, trying to push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.

“Democratic virtue.  There are no thieves here, apparently,” he muttered to himself, with displeasure.  Before advancing into the grounds he looked back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the clean, broad avenue.  The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him.

“Elector!  Eligible!  Enlightened!” Razumov muttered to himself.  “A brute, all the same.”

Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of the drive, trying to think of nothing—­to rest his head, to rest his emotions too.  But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house he faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference.  The mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him.  He stopped short and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow arches, meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept narrow flower-bed along its foot.

“It is here!” he thought, with a sort of awe.  “It is here—­on this very spot....”

He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting with Nathalie Haldin.  He confessed it to himself; but he did not move, and that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but because he knew that he had no place to fly to.  Moreover, he could not leave Geneva.  He recognized, even without thinking, that it was impossible.  It would have been a fatal admission, an act of moral suicide.  It would have been also physically dangerous.  Slowly he ascended the stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained greenish stone urns of funereal aspect.