m; while, on the other hand, it was easier for him to
avoid notice by mingling with the crowd. But all these agonizing
events had so enfeebled him that he could scarcely keep on his legs.
Great drops of perspiration streamed down his face; his neck was quite
wet. "I think you've had your fill!" shouted some one who took him for
a drunken man as he reached the canal bank.

He no longer knew what he was doing; the farther he went, the more
obscure became his ideas. However, when he found himself on the quay,
he became frightened at seeing so few people there, and, fearing that
he might be noticed on so deserted a spot, he returned to the lane.
Though he had hardly the strength to put one leg before the other, he
nevertheless took the longest way to reach his home. He had scarcely
recovered his presence of mind even when he crossed the threshold; at
least the thought of the hatchet never came to him until he was on the
stairs. Yet the question he had to solve was a most serious one: it
consisted in returning the hatchet to the place he had taken it from,
and in doing so without attracting the least attention. Had he been
more capable of considering his position, he would certainly have
understood that, instead of replacing the hatchet, it would be far
safer to get rid of it by throwing it into the yard of some other
house.

Nevertheless he met with no mishap. The door of the porter's lodge was
closed, though not locked; to all appearance, therefore, the porter
was at home. But Raskolnikoff had so thoroughly lost all faculty of
preparing any kind of plan, that he walked straight to the door and
opened it. If the porter had asked him: "What do you want?" perhaps he
would simply have handed him the hatchet. But, the same as on the
previous occasion, the porter was absent, and this gave the young man
every facility to replace the hatchet under the bench, exactly where
he had found it. Then he went upstairs and reached his room without
meeting a soul; the door of his landlady's apartments was shut. Once
home again, he threw himself on his couch just as he was. He did not
sleep, but lay in a sort of semiconsciousness. If anybody had then
appeared before him, he would have sprung up and cried out. His head
was swimming with a host of vague thoughts: do what he could, he was
unable to follow the thread of one of them.

Raskolnikoff lay on the couch a very long while. At times he seemed to
rouse from this half sleep, and then he