and yet it gave me no pleasure.
I could not wear it, and above everything I had to hide from David
what I had done. What would he have thought of me and of my lack of
character? I could not even put my watch in the drawer, for we kept
all our things there in common. I had to hide it--at one time on the
top of the wardrobe, at another under the mattress, again behind the
stove; and yet I did not succeed in deceiving David.

Once I had taken the watch from under the planks of our floor, and was
trying to polish its silver case with an old leather glove. David
had gone somewhere down town, and I did not think he was back when
suddenly there he stood in the doorway! I was so confused that I
almost let the watch drop, and, my face hot with blushes, I felt
despairingly for my waistcoat pocket to put my watch into it. David
looked at me and smiled in his silent way. "What are you after?" he
said at last. "Did you think I didn't know you'd got the watch again?
I saw it the first day you brought it back."

"I assure you--" I began with tears.

David shrugged his shoulders: "The watch is yours: you can do what you
please with it."

When he had said those hard words he went out. I was overcome with
mortification. This time there was no doubt that David despised me.
That could not be borne. "I will show him," I said to myself, setting
my teeth hard. With a firm step I walked into the next room, where our
servant Juschka was, and gave him the watch. At first Juschka would
not take it, but I declared to him that if he would not take the watch
I would break it into pieces, trample it to powder, crush it to atoms.
He thought for a moment, and finally consented to take it. When I came
back to our room I found David reading a book. I told him what I
had done. He did not lift his eyes from the page he was reading, but
shrugged his shoulders again and said, "The watch is yours to do what
you like with it." But it seemed to me as if he despised me a little
less. I was fully determined not again to lay myself open to the
charge of having no character, for this watch, this hateful present
of my hateful godfather, had become so detestable that I could not
understand how I could ever have been sorry to lose it, how I could
have brought myself to begging it from a man like Trofimytsch, and
give him the right to believe that he had behaved generously to me in
regard to it.

Some days passed by. I remember that on one of them there came a g