and with weariness.

"Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?" Sophia
Antonovna was anxious to know.

"Yes." Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling
into a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he
probably could not have said no. "He mentioned to me once," he added, as
if making an effort of memory, "a house of that sort. He used to visit
some workmen there."

"Exactly."

Sophia Antonovna triumphed. Her correspondent had discovered that fact
quite accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having
made friends with a workman who occupied a room there. They described
Haldin's appearance perfectly. He brought comforting words of hope into
their misery. He came irregularly, but he came very often, and--her
correspondent wrote--sometimes he spent a night in the house, sleeping,
they thought, in a stable which opened upon the inner yard.

"Note that, Razumov! In a stable."

Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.

"Yes. In the straw. It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole
house."

"No doubt," assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw
closer together her black eyes in a sinister fashion. No four-footed
beast could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were
condemned to suffer from in Russia. The point of this discovery was that
it proved Haldin to have been familiar with that horse-owning peasant--a
reckless, independent, free-living fellow not much liked by the other
inhabitants of the house. He was believed to have been the associate of
a band of housebreakers. Some of these got captured. Not while he was
driving them, however; but still there was a suspicion against the
fellow of having given a hint to the police and...

The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.

"And you? Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain
Ziemianitch?"

Razumov was ready for the name. He had been looking out for the
question. "When it comes I shall own up," he had said to himself. But he
took his time.

"To be sure!" he began slowly. "Ziemianitch, a peasant owning a team of
horses. Yes. On one occasion. Ziemianitch! Certainly! Ziemianitch of the
horses.... How could it have slipped my memory like this? One of the
last conversations we had together."

"That means,"--Sophia Antonovna looked very grave,--"that means,
Razumov, it was very shortly before--eh?"

"Before w