own superiority.  A vanquished phantom—­nothing more.  Often in the evening, his repaired watch faintly ticking on the table by the side of the lighted lamp, Razumov would look up from his writing and stare at the bed with an expectant, dispassionate attention.  Nothing was to be seen there.  He never really supposed that anything ever could be seen there.  After a while he would shrug his shoulders slightly and bend again over his work.  For he had gone to work and, at first, with some success.  His unwillingness to leave that place where he was safe from Haldin grew so strong that at last he ceased to go out at all.  From early morning till far into the night he wrote, he wrote for nearly a week; never looking at the time, and only throwing himself on the bed when he could keep his eyes open no longer.  Then, one afternoon, quite casually, he happened to glance at his watch.  He laid down his pen slowly.

“At this very hour,” was his thought, “the fellow stole unseen into this room while I was out.  And there he sat quiet as a mouse—­perhaps in this very chair.”  Razumov got up and began to pace the floor steadily, glancing at the watch now and then.  “This is the time when I returned and found him standing against the stove,” he observed to himself.  When it grew dark he lit his lamp.  Later on he interrupted his tramping once more, only to wave away angrily the girl who attempted to enter the room with tea and something to eat on a tray.  And presently he noted the watch pointing at the hour of his own going forth into the falling snow on that terrible errand.

“Complicity,” he muttered faintly, and resumed his pacing, keeping his eye on the hands as they crept on slowly to the time of his return.

“And, after all,” he thought suddenly, “I might have been the chosen instrument of Providence.  This is a manner of speaking, but there may be truth in every manner of speaking.  What if that absurd saying were true in its essence?”

He meditated for a while, then sat down, his legs stretched out, with stony eyes, and with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair like a man totally abandoned by Providence—­desolate.

He noted the time of Haldin’s departure and continued to sit still for another half-hour; then muttering, “And now to work,” drew up to the table, seized the pen and instantly dropped it under the influence of a profoundly disquieting reflection:  “There’s three weeks gone by and no word from Mikulin.”

What did it mean!  Was he forgotten?  Possibly.  Then why not remain forgotten—­creep in somewhere?  Hide.  But where?  How?  With whom?  In what hole?  And was it to be for ever, or what?

But a retreat was big with shadowy dangers.  The eye of the social revolution was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation.  Was it possible that he no longer belonged to himself?  This was damnable.  But why not simply keep on as before?  Study.  Advance.  Work hard as if nothing had happened (and first of all win the Silver Medal), acquire distinction, become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States.  Servant, too, of the mightiest homogeneous mass of mankind with a capability for logical, guided development in a brotherly solidarity of force and aim such as the world had never dreamt of... the Russian nation!