on the morrow and tell him that he
had seen her, he had repudiated the demon as he walked to the house, and
his heart had been full of joy.

Was there something in the whole aspect of the man, today, sufficient
to justify the prince's terror, and the awful suspicions of his demon?
Something seen, but indescribable, which filled him with dreadful
presentiments? Yes, he was convinced of it--convinced of what? (Oh, how
mean and hideous of him to feel this conviction, this presentiment! How
he blamed himself for it!) "Speak if you dare, and tell me, what is the
presentiment?" he repeated to himself, over and over again. "Put it into
words, speak out clearly and distinctly. Oh, miserable coward that I
am!" The prince flushed with shame for his own baseness. "How shall I
ever look this man in the face again? My God, what a day! And what a
nightmare, what a nightmare!"

There was a moment, during this long, wretched walk back from the
Petersburg Side, when the prince felt an irresistible desire to go
straight to Rogojin's, wait for him, embrace him with tears of shame and
contrition, and tell him of his distrust, and finish with it--once for
all.

But here he was back at his hotel.

How often during the day he had thought of this hotel with loathing--its
corridor, its rooms, its stairs. How he had dreaded coming back to it,
for some reason.

"What a regular old woman I am today," he had said to himself each time,
with annoyance. "I believe in every foolish presentiment that comes into
my head."

He stopped for a moment at the door; a great flush of shame came over
him. "I am a coward, a wretched coward," he said, and moved forward
again; but once more he paused.

Among all the incidents of the day, one recurred to his mind to the
exclusion of the rest; although now that his self-control was regained,
and he was no longer under the influence of a nightmare, he was able
to think of it calmly. It concerned the knife on Rogojin's table. "Why
should not Rogojin have as many knives on his table as he chooses?"
thought the prince, wondering at his suspicions, as he had done when he
found himself looking into the cutler's window. "What could it have to
do with me?" he said to himself again, and stopped as if rooted to the
ground by a kind of paralysis of limb such as attacks people under the
stress of some humiliating recollection.

The doorway was dark and gloomy at any time; but just at this moment
it was rendered doubly