looking down at the little white dial. It wanted yet three minutes
to midnight. He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.

"Slow," he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him.
His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an
instant and fell on the floor. He was so startled that he nearly fell
himself. When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to
stoop for it he held it to his ear at once. After a while he growled--

"Stopped," and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly--

"It's done.... And now to work."

He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began
to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold
on the print completely and did not try to regain it. He thought--

"There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house
across the street."

He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a
cloak to the nose and with a General's plumed, cocked hat on his head.
This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally
had to shake his head violently to get rid of it. The man would be
disguised perhaps as a peasant... a beggar.... Perhaps he would
be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick--a
shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw onions and spirits.

This evocation brought on positive nausea. "Why do I want to bother
about this?" thought Razumov with disgust. "Am I a gendarme? Moreover,
it is done."

He got up in great agitation. It was not done. Not yet. Not till
half-past twelve. And the watch had stopped. This reduced him to
despair. Impossible to know the time! The landlady and all the people
across the landing were asleep. How could he go and... God knows
what they would imagine, or how much they would guess. He dared not
go into the streets to find out. "I am a suspect now. There's no use
shirking that fact," he said to himself bitterly. If Haldin from
some cause or another gave them the slip and failed to turn up in the
Karabelnaya the police would be invading his lodging. And if he were not
in he could never clear himself. Never. Razumov looked wildly about as
if for some means of seizing upon time which seemed to have escaped
him altogether. He had never, as far as he could remember, heard the
striking of that town clock in his rooms before this night. And he was
not even sure now whether he had heard it really