He laughed for joy when again in the street.  All traces were gone, and who would think of looking there?  And if they were found who would suspect him?  All proofs were gone, and he laughed again.  Yes, he recollected afterwards how he laughed—­a long, nervous, lingering laugh, lasting all the time he was in that street.

He reached home toward evening, perhaps at about eight o’clock—­how, and by what particular way he never recollected—­but, speedily undressing, he lay down on the couch, trembling like a beaten horse, and, drawing his overcoat over him, he fell immediately into a deep sleep.  He awoke in a high fever and delirious.  Some days later he came to himself, rose and went out.  It was eight o’clock, and the sun had disappeared.  The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness.  And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face.  He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to be finished “today,” at one blow, immediately, or he would never return home, because he had no desire to live thus.  How to finish?  By what means?  No matter how, and he did not want to think.  He drove away any thoughts which disturbed him, and only clung to the necessity of ending all, “no matter how,” said he, with desperate self-confidence and decision.  By force of habit he took his old walk, and set out in the direction of the Haymarket.  Farther on, he came on a young man who was grinding some very feeling ballads upon a barrel organ.  Near the man, on the footpath, was a young girl of about fifteen years of age, fashionably dressed, with crinoline, mantle, and gloves, and a straw hat trimmed with gaudy feathers, but all old and terribly worn out, who, in a loud and cracked though not altogether unpleasing voice, was singing before a shop in expectation of a couple of kopecks.  Raskolnikoff stopped and joined one or two listeners, took out a five-kopeck piece, and gave it to the girl.  The latter at once stopped on a very high note which she had just reached, and cried to the man, “Come along,” and both immediately moved on to another place.

“Do you like street music?” said Raskolnikoff to a middle-aged man standing near him.  The latter looked at him in surprise, but smiled.  “I love it,” continued Raskolnikoff, “especially when they sing to the organ on a cold, dark, gray winter’s evening, when all the passers-by seem to have pale, green, sickly-looking faces—­when the snow is falling like a sleet, straight down and with no wind, you know, and while the lamps shine on it all.”

“I don’t know.  Excuse me,” said the man, frightened at the question and Raskolnikoff’s strange appearance, and hastily withdrawing to the other side of the street.

Raskolnikoff went on, and came to the place in the Haymarket where he had met the trader and his wife and Elizabeth.  No one was there at the moment.  He stopped, and turned to a young fellow, in a red shirt, who was gaping at the entrance to a flour shop.