him in passing: "How is it we never see
you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" Razumov was conscious of
meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor
was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all
this was Haldin, always Haldin--nothing but Haldin--everywhere Haldin:
a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of
the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on
his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to
haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it,
but that there he had no sort of power. There it was Razumov who had
the upper hand, in a composed sense of his 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