ivered across the
ceiling and over the walls. A stranger in the house, with its
paintings, its statues and its silence, the light--itself silent and
indefinite--awakened painful thoughts in him as to the vanity of bolts
and guards and walls. And then, in the dead of night, in the silence and
solitude of a strange bedroom, a sensation of unbearable fear swept over
the dignitary.

He had some kidney trouble, and whenever he grew strongly agitated, his
face, his hands and his feet became swollen. Now, rising like a mountain
of bloated flesh above the taut springs of the bed, he felt, with the
anguish of a sick man, his swollen face, which seemed to him to belong
to some one else. Unceasingly he kept thinking of the cruel fate which
people were preparing for him. He recalled, one after another, all the
recent horrible instances of bombs that had been thrown at men of even
greater eminence than himself; he recalled how the bombs had torn bodies
to pieces, had spattered brains over dirty brick walls, had knocked
teeth from their roots. And influenced by these meditations, it seemed
to him that his own stout, sickly body, outspread on the bed, was
already experiencing the fiery shock of the explosion. He seemed to
be able to feel his arms being severed from the shoulders, his teeth
knocked out, his brains scattered into particles, his feet growing numb,
lying quietly, their toes upward, like those of a dead man. He stirred
with an effort, breathed loudly and coughed in order not to seem to
himself to resemble a corpse in any way. He encouraged himself with
the live noise of the grating springs, of the rustling blanket; and to
assure himself that he was actually alive and not dead, he uttered in
a bass voice, loudly and abruptly, in the silence and solitude of the
bedroom:

"Molodtsi! Molodtsi! Molodtsi! (Good boys)!"

He was praising the detectives, the police, and the soldiers--all those
who guarded his life, and who so opportunely and so cleverly had averted
the assassination. But even though he stirred, even though he praised
his protectors, even though he forced an unnatural smile, in order
to express his contempt for the foolish, unsuccessful terrorists, he
nevertheless did not believe in his safety, he was not sure that his
life would not leave him suddenly, at once. Death, which people had
devised for him, and which was only in their minds, in their intention,
seemed to him to be already standing there in the room. I