At last he reached a narrow lane; he entered it more dead than alive.  There, he was almost in safety, and he knew it:  in such a place, suspicion could hardly be fixed upon him; while, on the other hand, it was easier for him to avoid notice by mingling with the crowd.  But all these agonizing events had so enfeebled him that he could scarcely keep on his legs.  Great drops of perspiration streamed down his face; his neck was quite wet.  “I think you’ve had your fill!” shouted some one who took him for a drunken man as he reached the canal bank.

He no longer knew what he was doing; the farther he went, the more obscure became his ideas.  However, when he found himself on the quay, he became frightened at seeing so few people there, and, fearing that he might be noticed on so deserted a spot, he returned to the lane.  Though he had hardly the strength to put one leg before the other, he nevertheless took the longest way to reach his home.  He had scarcely recovered his presence of mind even when he crossed the threshold; at least the thought of the hatchet never came to him until he was on the stairs.  Yet the question he had to solve was a most serious one:  it consisted in returning the hatchet to the place he had taken it from, and in doing so without attracting the least attention.  Had he been more capable of considering his position, he would certainly have understood that, instead of replacing the hatchet, it would be far safer to get rid of it by throwing it into the yard of some other house.

Nevertheless he met with no mishap.  The door of the porter’s lodge was closed, though not locked; to all appearance, therefore, the porter was at home.  But Raskolnikoff had so thoroughly lost all faculty of preparing any kind of plan, that he walked straight to the door and opened it.  If the porter had asked him:  “What do you want?” perhaps he would simply have handed him the hatchet.  But, the same as on the previous occasion, the porter was absent, and this gave the young man every facility to replace the hatchet under the bench, exactly where he had found it.  Then he went upstairs and reached his room without meeting a soul; the door of his landlady’s apartments was shut.  Once home again, he threw himself on his couch just as he was.  He did not sleep, but lay in a sort of semiconsciousness.  If anybody had then appeared before him, he would have sprung up and cried out.  His head was swimming with a host of vague thoughts:  do what he could, he was unable to follow the thread of one of them.

Raskolnikoff lay on the couch a very long while.  At times he seemed to rouse from this half sleep, and then he noticed that the night was very far advanced, but still it never entered his head to rise.  Soon it began to brighten into day, and the dawn found him in a state of stupefaction, lying motionless on his back.  A desperate clamor, and sounds of brawls from the streets below, rose to his ears.  These awakened him thoroughly, although he heard them every