and, together with the
faculty of watching the only approach.

He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the
place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The
materials he had on him. "I shall always come here," he said to himself,
and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought
and sight and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the
declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw
the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he
pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his
knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the
connecting arm of the bridge. These glances were needless; the people
crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the
islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the _Social Contract_ sat
enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of
bronze. After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish
haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first
tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But
the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful
nicety. That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless,
the papers holding in his left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got
up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees.

"There can be no doubt that now I am safe," he thought. His fine ear
could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking
against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to
them with interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was
too elusive.

"Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to," he murmured. And
it occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen
to innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were. Yes, the sound of
water, the voice of the wind--completely foreign to human passions. All
the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of
a soul.

This was Mr. Razumov's feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and
the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far
as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his
body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth. And it
must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov's ca