w water, and
Nikodim Fomitch standing before him, looking intently at him. He got up
from the chair.

"What's this? Are you ill?" Nikodim Fomitch asked, rather sharply.

"He could hardly hold his pen when he was signing," said the head clerk,
settling back in his place, and taking up his work again.

"Have you been ill long?" cried Ilya Petrovitch from his place, where
he, too, was looking through papers. He had, of course, come to look at
the sick man when he fainted, but retired at once when he recovered.

"Since yesterday," muttered Raskolnikov in reply.

"Did you go out yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Though you were ill?"

"Yes."

"At what time?"

"About seven."

"And where did you go, my I ask?"

"Along the street."

"Short and clear."

Raskolnikov, white as a handkerchief, had answered sharply, jerkily,
without dropping his black feverish eyes before Ilya Petrovitch's stare.

"He can scarcely stand upright. And you..." Nikodim Fomitch was
beginning.

"No matter," Ilya Petrovitch pronounced rather peculiarly.

Nikodim Fomitch would have made some further protest, but glancing at
the head clerk who was looking very hard at him, he did not speak. There
was a sudden silence. It was strange.

"Very well, then," concluded Ilya Petrovitch, "we will not detain you."

Raskolnikov went out. He caught the sound of eager conversation on his
departure, and above the rest rose the questioning voice of Nikodim
Fomitch. In the street, his faintness passed off completely.

"A search--there will be a search at once," he repeated to himself,
hurrying home. "The brutes! they suspect."

His former terror mastered him completely again.

CHAPTER II

"And what if there has been a search already? What if I find them in my
room?"

But here was his room. Nothing and no one in it. No one had peeped in.
Even Nastasya had not touched it. But heavens! how could he have left
all those things in the hole?

He rushed to the corner, slipped his hand under the paper, pulled the
things out and lined his pockets with them. There were eight articles in
all: two little boxes with ear-rings or something of the sort, he hardly
looked to see; then four small leather cases. There was a chain, too,
merely wrapped in newspaper and something else in newspaper, that looked
like a decoration.... He put them all in the different pockets of his
overcoat, and the remaining pocket of his trousers, trying to conceal
them as much as possi