mself, he drew back his hand, thrust
the revolver into his pocket, and without saying another word ran out of
the house. Liputin followed him. They clambered through the same gap and
again walked along the slope holding to the fence. Pyotr Stepanovitch
strode rapidly down the street so that Liputin could scarcely keep up
with him. At the first crossing he suddenly stopped.

"Well?" He turned to Liputin with a challenge.

Liputin remembered the revolver and was still trembling all over after
the scene he had witnessed; but the answer seemed to come of itself
irresistibly from his tongue:

"I think... I think that..."

"Did you see what Fedka was drinking in the kitchen?"

"What he was drinking? He was drinking vodka."

"Well then, let me tell you it's the last time in his life he will drink
vodka. I recommend you to remember that and reflect on it. And now go to
hell; you are not wanted till to-morrow. But mind now, don't be a fool!"

Liputin rushed home full speed.

IV

He had long had a passport in readiness made out in a false name. It
seems a wild idea that this prudent little man, the petty despot of
his family, who was, above all things, a sharp man of business and a
capitalist, and who was an official too (though he was a Fourierist),
should long before have conceived the fantastic project of procuring
this passport in case of emergency, that he might escape abroad by means
of it _if_... he did admit the possibility of this if, though no doubt he
was never able himself to formulate what this _if_ might mean.

But now it suddenly formulated itself, and in a most unexpected way.
That desperate idea with which he had gone to Kirillov's after that
"fool" he had heard from Pyotr Stepanovitch on the pavement, had been
to abandon everything at dawn next day and to emigrate abroad. If anyone
doubts that such fantastic incidents occur in everyday Russian life,
even now, let him look into the biographies of all the Russian exiles
abroad. Not one of them escaped with more wisdom or real justification.
It has always been the unrestrained domination of phantoms and nothing
more.

Running home, he began by locking himself in, getting out his travelling
bag, and feverishly beginning to pack. His chief anxiety was the
question of money, and how much he could rescue from the impending
ruin--and by what means. He thought of it as "rescuing," for it seemed
to him that he could not linger an hour, and that by daylight he