“Aha!  Your correspondent,” Razumov said in an almost openly mocking tone.  “What suspicions?  How aroused?  By this Ziemianitch?  Probably some drunken, gabbling, plausible...”

“You talk as if you had known him.”

Razumov looked up.

“No.  But I knew Haldin.”

Sophia Antonovna nodded gravely.

“I see.  Every word you say confirms to my mind the suspicion communicated to me in that very interesting letter.  This Ziemianitch was found one morning hanging from a hook in the stable—­dead.”

Razumov felt a profound trouble.  It was visible, because Sophia Antonovna was moved to observe vivaciously—­

“Aha!  You begin to see.”

He saw it clearly enough—­in the light of a lantern casting spokes of shadow in a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long boots hanging against the wall.  A pointed hood, with the ends wound about up to the eyes, hid the face.  “But that does not concern me,” he reflected.  “It does not affect my position at all.  He never knew who had thrashed him.  He could not have known.”  Razumov felt sorry for the old lover of the bottle and women.

“Yes.  Some of them end like that,” he muttered.  “What is your idea, Sophia Antonovna?”

It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had adopted it fully.  She stated it in one word—­“Remorse.”  Razumov opened his eyes very wide at that.  Sophia Antonovna’s informant, by listening to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had managed to come very near to the truth of Haldin’s relation to Ziemianitch.

“It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of—­that your friend had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St. Petersburg, at any rate.  Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for the rest.  And that fellow’s horses were part of the plan.”

“They have actually got at the truth,” Razumov marvelled to himself, while he nodded judicially.  “Yes, that’s possible, very possible.”  But the woman revolutionist was very positive that it was so.  First of all, a conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been partly overheard.  Then there were the suspicions of the people in the house when their “young gentleman” (they did not know Haldin by his name) ceased to call at the house.  Some of them used to charge Ziemianitch with knowing something of this absence.  He denied it with exasperation; but the fact was that ever since Haldin’s disappearance he was not himself, growing moody and thin.  Finally, during a quarrel with some woman (to whom he was making up), in which most of the inmates of the house took part apparently, he was openly abused by his chief enemy, an athletic pedlar, for an informer, and for having driven “our young gentleman to Siberia, the same as you did those young fellows who broke into houses.”  In consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch got flung down a flight of stairs.  Thereupon he drank and moped for a week, and then hanged himself.