but for you I should have perished out there. I should have been a long
time paying it back if it had not been for your mother. She made me a
present of that note nine months ago, because I was so badly off after
my illness. But, go on, please...."

He was breathless.

"In America you changed your views, and when you came back you wanted to
resign. They gave you no answer, but charged you to take over a printing
press here in Russia from some one, and to keep it till you handed
it over to some one who would come from them for it. I don't know
the details exactly, but I fancy that's the position in outline. You
undertook it in the hope, or on the condition, that it would be the last
task they would require of you, and that then they would release you
altogether. Whether that is so or not, I learnt it, not from them, but
quite by chance. But now for what I fancy you don't know; these gentry
have no intention of parting with you."

"That's absurd!" cried Shatov. "I've told them honestly that I've cut
myself off from them in everything. That is my right, the right to
freedom of conscience and of thought.... I won't put up with it! There's
no power which could..."

"I say, don't shout," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch said earnestly, checking
him. "That Verhovensky is such a fellow that he may be listening to us
now in your passage, perhaps, with his own ears or some one else's. Even
that drunkard, Lebyadkin, was probably bound to keep an eye on you,
and you on him, too, I dare say? You'd better tell me, has Verhovensky
accepted your arguments now, or not?"

"He has. He has said that it can be done and that I have the right... ."

"Well then, he's deceiving you. I know that even Kirillov, who scarcely
belongs to them at all, has given them information about you. And they
have lots of agents, even people who don't know that they're serving
the society. They've always kept a watch on you. One of the things Pyotr
Verhovensky came here for was to settle your business once for all, and
he is fully authorised to do so, that is at the first good opportunity,
to get rid of you, as a man who knows too much and might give them away.
I repeat that this is certain, and allow me to add that they are, for
some reason, convinced that you are a spy, and that if you haven't
informed against them yet, you will. Is that true?"

Shatov made a wry face at hearing such a question asked in such a
matter-of fact tone.

"If I were a spy, whom cou