nly no sound! The house was still, and, with that, the sense of
danger and peril was redoubled, as though the house were holding its
breath as it watched....

Bohun could endure it no longer; he got up, put on his dressing-gown and
bedroom slippers, and went out. When he got as far as the dining-room
door he saw that Markovitch was standing in the middle of the room with
a lighted candle in his hand. The glimmer of the candle flung a circle,
outside which all was dusk. Within the glimmer there was Markovitch, his
hair rough and strangely like a wig, his face pale yellow, and wearing
an old quilted bed-jacket of a purple green colour. He was in a
night-dress, and his naked legs were like sticks of tallow.

He stood there, the candle shaking in his hand, as though he were
uncertain as to what he would do next. He was saying something to
himself, Bohun thought.

At any rate his lips were moving. Then he put his hand into the pocket
of his bed-coat and took out a revolver. Bohun saw it gleam in the
candle-light. He held it up close to his eyes as though he were
short-sighted and seemed to sniff at it. Then, clumsily, Bohun said, he
opened it, to see whether it were loaded, I suppose, and closed it
again. After that, very softly indeed, he shuffled off towards the door
of Semyonov's room, the room that had once been the sanctuary of his
inventions.

All this time young Bohun was paralysed. He said that all his life now,
in spite of his having done quite decently in France, he would doubt his
capacity in a crisis because, during the whole of this affair, he never
stirred. But that was because it was all exactly like a dream. "I was in
the dream, you know, as well as the other fellows. You know those dreams
when you're doing your very damnedest to wake up--when you struggle and
sweat and know you'll die if something doesn't happen--well, it was like
that, except that I didn't struggle and swear, but just stood there,
like a painted picture, watching...."

Markovitch had nearly reached Semyonov's door (you remember that there
was a little square window of glass in the upper part of it) when he did
a funny thing. He stopped dead as though some one had rapped him on the
shoulder. He stopped and looked round, then, very slowly, as though he
were compelled, gazed with his nervous blinking eyes up at the portrait
of the old gentleman with the bushy eyebrows. Bohun looked up too and
saw (it was probably a trick of the faltering