“I suppose you remember seeing me before?  That evening when Natalia came to ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young man who...”

“I remember perfectly,” I said.  When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had in my possession that young man’s journal given me by Miss Haldin she became intensely interested.  She did not conceal her curiosity to see the document.

I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me next day for that purpose.

She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed me the book with a faint sigh.  While moving about Russia, she had seen Razumov too.  He lived, not “in the centre,” but “in the south.”  She described to me a little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some very small town, hiding within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown with nettles.  He was crippled, ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla the Samaritan tended him unweariedly with the pure joy of unselfish devotion.  There was nothing in that task to become disillusioned about.

I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have visited Mr. Razumov.  I did not even understand the motive.  But she informed me that she was not the only one.

“Some of us always go to see him when passing through.  He is intelligent.  We has ideas....  He talks well, too.”

Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov’s public confession in Laspara’s house.  Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what had occurred there.  Razumov himself had told her all about it, most minutely.

Then, looking hard at me with her brilliant black eyes—­

“There are evil moments in every life.  A false suggestion enters one’s brain, and then fear is born—­fear of oneself, fear for oneself.  Or else a false courage—­who knows?  Well, call it what you like; but tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition (as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living, secretly debased in their own eyes?  How many?...  And please mark this—­he was safe when he did it.  It was just when he believed himself safe and more—­infinitely more—­when the possibility of being loved by that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work of his hate and pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him.  There’s character in such a discovery.”

I accepted her conclusion in silence.  Who would care to question the grounds of forgiveness or compassion?  However, it appeared later on, that there was some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the revolutionary world to Razumov the betrayer.  Sophia Antonovna continued uneasily—­

“And then, you know, he was the victim of an outrage.  It was not authorized.  Nothing was decided as to what was to be done with him.  He had confessed voluntarily.  And that Nikita who burst the drums of his ears purposely, out on the landing, you know, as if carried away by indignation—­well, he has turned out to be a scoundrel of the worst kind—­a traitor himself, a betrayer—­a spy!  Razumov told me he had charged him with it by a sort of inspiration....”