Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells of the unclean staircase.  All quiet.

He went back into his room slowly, shutting the doors after him.  The peaceful steady light of his reading-lamp shone on the watch.  Razumov stood looking down at the little white dial.  It wanted yet three minutes to midnight.  He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.

“Slow,” he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him.  His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an instant and fell on the floor.  He was so startled that he nearly fell himself.  When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to stoop for it he held it to his ear at once.  After a while he growled—­

“Stopped,” and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly—­

“It’s done....  And now to work.”

He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold on the print completely and did not try to regain it.  He thought—­

“There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house across the street.”

He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a cloak to the nose and with a General’s plumed, cocked hat on his head.  This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively.  He literally had to shake his head violently to get rid of it.  The man would be disguised perhaps as a peasant... a beggar....  Perhaps he would be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick—­a shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw onions and spirits.

This evocation brought on positive nausea.  “Why do I want to bother about this?” thought Razumov with disgust.  “Am I a gendarme?  Moreover, it is done.”

He got up in great agitation.  It was not done.  Not yet.  Not till half-past twelve.  And the watch had stopped.  This reduced him to despair.  Impossible to know the time!  The landlady and all the people across the landing were asleep.  How could he go and...  God knows what they would imagine, or how much they would guess.  He dared not go into the streets to find out.  “I am a suspect now.  There’s no use shirking that fact,” he said to himself bitterly.  If Haldin from some cause or another gave them the slip and failed to turn up in the Karabelnaya the police would be invading his lodging.  And if he were not in he could never clear himself.  Never.  Razumov looked wildly about as if for some means of seizing upon time which seemed to have escaped him altogether.  He had never, as far as he could remember, heard the striking of that town clock in his rooms before this night.  And he was not even sure now whether he had heard it really on this night.