kill his assailant at once, on the spot, without challenging
him.

Yet, in the present case, what happened was something different and
amazing.

He had scarcely regained his balance after being almost knocked over in
this humiliating way, and the horrible, as it were, sodden, thud of
the blow in the face had scarcely died away in the room when he seized
Shatov by the shoulders with both hands, but at once, almost at the same
instant, pulled both hands away and clasped them behind his back. He did
not speak, but looked at Shatov, and turned as white as his shirt. But,
strange to say, the light in his eyes seemed to die out. Ten seconds
later his eyes looked cold, and I'm sure I'm not lying--calm. Only he
was terribly pale. Of course I don't know what was passing within the
man, I saw only his exterior. It seems to me that if a man should snatch
up a bar of red-hot iron and hold it tight in his hand to test his
fortitude, and after struggling for ten seconds with insufferable pain
end by overcoming it, such a man would, I fancy, go through something
like what Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch was enduring during those ten seconds.

Shatov was the first to drop his eyes, and evidently because he was
unable to go on facing him; then he turned slowly and walked out of the
room, but with a very different step. He withdrew quietly, with peculiar
awkwardness, with his shoulders hunched, his head hanging as though
he were inwardly pondering something. I believe he was whispering
something. He made his way to the door carefully, without stumbling
against anything or knocking anything over; he opened the door a very
little way, and squeezed through almost sideways. As he went out his
shock of hair standing on end at the back of his head was particularly
noticeable.

Then first of all one fearful scream was heard. I saw Lizaveta
Nikolaevna seize her mother by the shoulder and Mavriky Nikolaevitch by
the arm and make two or three violent efforts to draw them out of the
room. But she suddenly uttered a shriek, and fell full length on the
floor, fainting. I can hear the thud of her head on the carpet to this
day.

PART II

CHAPTER I. NIGHT

EIGHT DAYS HAD PASSED. Now that it is all over and I am writing a record
of it, we know all about it; but at the time we knew nothing, and it was
natural that many things should seem strange to us: Stepan Trofimovitch
and I, anyway, shut ourselves up for the first part of the time, an