Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.

“Or is it that some secret enemy has been calumniating you, Kirylo Sidorovitch?  The world is full of black hearts and false denunciations nowadays.  There is much fear about.”

“Have you heard that I have been denounced by some one?” asked Razumov, without taking his eyes off her quivering face.

But she had not heard anything.  She had tried to find out by asking the police captain while his men were turning the room upside down.  The police captain of the district had known her for the last eleven years and was a humane person.  But he said to her on the landing, looking very black and vexed—­

“My good woman, do not ask questions.  I don’t know anything myself.  The order comes from higher quarters.”

And indeed there had appeared, shortly after the arrival of the policemen of the district, a very superior gentleman in a fur coat and a shiny hat, who sat down in the room and looked through all the papers himself.  He came alone and went away by himself, taking nothing with him.  She had been trying to put things straight a little since they left.

Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his rooms.

All his books had been shaken and thrown on the floor.  His landlady followed him, and stooping painfully began to pick them up into her apron.  His papers and notes which were kept always neatly sorted (they all related to his studies) had been shuffled up and heaped together into a ragged pile in the middle of the table.

This disorder affected him profoundly, unreasonably.  He sat down and stared.  He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being undermined in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away from him one by one.  He even experienced a slight physical giddiness and made a movement as if to reach for something to steady himself with.

The old woman, rising to her feet with a low groan, shot all the books she had collected in her apron on to the sofa and left the room muttering and sighing.

It was only then that he noticed that the sheet of paper which for one night had remained stabbed to the wall above his empty bed was lying on top of the pile.

When he had taken it down the day before he had folded it in four, absent-mindedly, before dropping it on the table.  And now he saw it lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even and covering all the confused pile of pages, the record of his intellectual life for the last three years.  It had not been flung there.  It had been placed there—­smoothed out, too!  He guessed in that an intention of profound meaning—­or perhaps some inexplicable mockery.