Haldin was talking on.

“This morning—­ah! this morning—­that was different.  How can I explain to you?  Before the deed was done I wandered at night and lay hid in the day, thinking it out, and I felt restful.  Sleepless but restful.  What was there for me to torment myself about?  But this morning—­after!  Then it was that I became restless.  I could not have stopped in that big house full of misery.  The miserable of this world can’t give you peace.  Then when that silly caretaker began to shout, I said to myself, ’There is a young man in this town head and shoulders above common prejudices.’”

“Is he laughing at me?” Razumov asked himself, going on with his aimless drawing of triangles and squares.  And suddenly he thought:  “My behaviour must appear to him strange.  Should he take fright at my manner and rush off somewhere I shall be undone completely.  That infernal General....”

He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly towards the bed with the shadowy figure extended full length on it—­so much more indistinct than the one over whose breast he had walked without faltering.  Was this, too, a phantom?

The silence had lasted a long time.  “He is no longer here,” was the thought against which Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened at its absurdity.  “He is already gone and this...only...”

He could resist no longer.  He sprang to his feet, saying aloud, “I am intolerably anxious,” and in a few headlong strides stood by the side of the bed.  His hand fell lightly on Haldin’s shoulder, and directly he felt its reality he was beset by an insane temptation to grip that exposed throat and squeeze the breath out of that body, lest it should escape his custody, leaving only a phantom behind.

Haldin did not stir a limb, but his overshadowed eyes moving a little gazed upwards at Razumov with wistful gratitude for this manifestation of feeling.

Razumov turned away and strode up and down the room.  “It would have been possibly a kindness,” he muttered to himself, and was appalled by the nature of that apology for a murderous intention his mind had found somewhere within him.  And all the same he could not give it up.  He became lucid about it.  “What can he expect?” he thought.  “The halter—­in the end.  And I....”

This argument was interrupted by Haldin’s voice.

“Why be anxious for me?  They can kill my body, but they cannot exile my soul from this world.  I tell you what—­I believe in this world so much that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than as a very long life.  That is perhaps the reason I am so ready to die.”

“H’m,” muttered Razumov, and biting his lower lip he continued to walk up and down and to carry on his strange argument.

Yes, to a man in such a situation—­of course it would be an act of kindness.  The question, however, was not how to be kind, but how to be firm.  He was a slippery customer.