was no sign of Colia. The prince waited until four
o'clock, and then strolled off mechanically wherever his feet should
carry him.

In early summer there are often magnificent days in St.
Petersburg--bright, hot and still. This happened to be such a day.

For some time the prince wandered about without aim or object. He did
not know the town well. He stopped to look about him on bridges, at
street corners. He entered a confectioner's shop to rest, once. He was
in a state of nervous excitement and perturbation; he noticed nothing
and no one; and he felt a craving for solitude, to be alone with his
thoughts and his emotions, and to give himself up to them passively. He
loathed the idea of trying to answer the questions that would rise up
in his heart and mind. "I am not to blame for all this," he thought to
himself, half unconsciously.

Towards six o'clock he found himself at the station of the
Tsarsko-Selski railway.

He was tired of solitude now; a new rush of feeling took hold of him,
and a flood of light chased away the gloom, for a moment, from his soul.
He took a ticket to Pavlofsk, and determined to get there as fast as he
could, but something stopped him; a reality, and not a fantasy, as he
was inclined to think it. He was about to take his place in a carriage,
when he suddenly threw away his ticket and came out again, disturbed and
thoughtful. A few moments later, in the street, he recalled something
that had bothered him all the afternoon. He caught himself engaged in
a strange occupation which he now recollected he had taken up at odd
moments for the last few hours--it was looking about all around him for
something, he did not know what. He had forgotten it for a while, half
an hour or so, and now, suddenly, the uneasy search had recommenced.

But he had hardly become conscious of this curious phenomenon, when
another recollection suddenly swam through his brain, interesting him
for the moment, exceedingly. He remembered that the last time he had
been engaged in looking around him for the unknown something, he was
standing before a cutler's shop, in the window of which were exposed
certain goods for sale. He was extremely anxious now to discover whether
this shop and these goods really existed, or whether the whole thing had
been a hallucination.

He felt in a very curious condition today, a condition similar to that
which had preceded his fits in bygone years.

He remembered that at such times he had