going in to see his wife. "Again I fail to find out who he is."

Madame Navagin was a spiritualist, and so for all phenomena in
nature, comprehensible or incomprehensible, she had a very simple
explanation.

"There's nothing extraordinary about it," she said. "You don't
believe it, of course, but I have said it already and I say it
again: there is a great deal in the world that is supernatural,
which our feeble intellect can never grasp. I am convinced that
this Fedyukov is a spirit who has a sympathy for you . . . If I
were you, I would call him up and ask him what he wants."

"Nonsense, nonsense!"

Navagin was free from superstitions, but the phenomenon which
interested him was so mysterious that all sorts of uncanny devilry
intruded into his mind against his will. All the evening he was
imagining that the incognito Fedyukov was the spirit of some long-dead
clerk, who had been discharged from the service by Navagin's ancestors
and was now revenging himself on their descendant; or perhaps it
was the kinsman of some petty official dismissed by Navagin himself,
or of a girl seduced by him. . . .

All night Navagin dreamed of a gaunt old clerk in a shabby uniform,
with a face as yellow as a lemon, hair that stood up like a brush,
and pewtery eyes; the clerk said something in a sepulchral voice
and shook a bony finger at him. And Navagin almost had an attack
of inflammation of the brain.