“What is it?” she asked once more, weighing it in her hand and looking straight at her visitor.

“Cigarette case, silver, look at it.”

“It doesn’t feel as though it were silver.  Oh! what a dreadful knot!”

She began to untie the packet and turned to the light (all the windows were closed in spite of the heat).  Her back was turned toward Raskolnikoff, and for a few seconds she paid no further attention to him.  He opened his coat, freed the hatchet from the loop, but did not yet take it from its hiding place; he held it with his right hand beneath the garment.  His limbs were weak, each moment they grew more numbed and stiff.  He feared his fingers would relax their hold of the hatchet.  Then his head turned giddy.

“What is this you bring me?” cried Alena Ivanovna, turning to him in a rage.

There was not a moment to lose now.  He pulled out the hatchet, raised it with both hands, and let it descend without force, almost mechanically, on the old woman’s head.  But directly he had struck the blow his strength returned.  According to her usual habit, Alena Ivanovna was bareheaded.  Her scanty gray locks, greasy with oil, were gathered in one thin plait, which was fixed to the back of her neck by means of a piece of horn comb.  The hatchet struck her just on the sinciput, and this was partly owing to her small stature.  She scarcely uttered a faint cry and collapsed at once all in a heap on the floor; she was dead.

The murderer laid his hatchet down and at once began to search the corpse, taking the greatest precaution not to get stained with the blood; he remembered seeing Alena Ivanovna, on the occasion of his last visit, take her keys from the right-hand pocket of her dress.  He was in full possession of his intellect; he felt neither giddy nor dazed, but his hands continued to shake.  Later on, he recollected that he had been very prudent, very attentive, that he had taken every care not to soil himself.  It did not take him long to find the keys; the same as the other day, they were all together on a steel ring.  Having secured them, Raskolnikoff at once passed into the bedroom.  It was a very small apartment; on one side was a large glass case full of holy images, on the other a great bed looking very clean with its quilted-silk patchwork coverlet.  The third wall was occupied by a chest of drawers.  Strange to say, the young man had no sooner attempted to open them, he had no sooner commenced to try the keys, than a kind of shudder ran through his frame.  Again the idea came to him to give up his task and go away, but this weakness only lasted a second:  it was now too late to draw back.