everything else be taken away from me?" he thought.

He nerved himself for another effort to go on. Along the roadway sledges
glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the
black face of the night. "For it is a crime," he was saying to
himself. "A murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
institutions...."

A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. "I must be courageous,"
he exhorted himself mentally. All his strength was suddenly gone as
if taken out by a hand. Then by a mighty effort of will it came back
because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by
the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket. They would find
Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.

Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to have kept him up to the
end. The passers-by were rare. They came upon him suddenly, looming up
black in the snowflakes close by, then vanishing all at once-without
footfalls.

It was the quarter of the very poor. Razumov noticed an elderly woman
tied up in ragged shawls. Under the street lamp she seemed a beggar off
duty. She walked leisurely in the blizzard as though she had no home to
hurry to, she hugged under one arm a round loaf of black bread with
an air of guarding a priceless booty: and Razumov averting his glance
envied her the peace of her mind and the serenity of her fate.

To one reading Mr. Razumov's narrative it is really a wonder how he
managed to keep going as he did along one interminable street after
another on pavements that were gradually becoming blocked with snow.