Suddenly Ordynov, the child, awoke to Ordynov, the youth. The years had rolled away, and he found himself rudely confronted with the actual position of affairs, and forced to understand that he, a stranger, was alone in the world—alone among mysterious, dangerous people, among enemies who were gathered together in a dark corner of the room, who were whispering to one another, and exchanging signals with the old hunchback as she crouched beside the fire, while she pointed out the sick youth to them, and chafed her wrinkled hands. Extreme terror would seize upon the dreamer, and he would begin torturing himself with an agony of doubt as to who those people were, and why he himself was present with them. As a matter of fact, he would suspect that he had strayed into a nest of malefactors, whither some unknown power had lured him without first of all letting him see the aspect of its inhabitants or its master. At length his terror would become absolutely unbearable as, in the darkness, the old woman with the white, tremulous head would begin to recite a long, long story in a low voice—to recite it where she sat crouching by the dying fire. Then, to his still greater terror, the story would begin to take actual shape before him, until he could see actual gestures and faces, and could witness a repetition of all the thoughts that ever had passed through his mind—from the confused dreams of childhood to his very latest thoughts and acts, as well as all that he had ever read about, and all that he had so long ago forgotten. Then everything would come to life again, and would take unto itself forms which stretched to giddy heights, and whirled themselves around him. He would see stately, magic gardens unrolling their vast spaces before him, and great cities springing up and falling into decay, and graveyards vomiting out their dead, and nations rising and falling, and all his past thoughts materialising themselves around his sick pillow, and every dream coming to birth again in corporeal shape; until he would feel that no longer had he any spiritual conceptions left, but only physical worlds and actual, tangible edifices of ideas. And he would see himself lost, like a grain of sand, amid all this weird universe of dreams which was at once so indestructible and so infinite. He would feel that life was pressing with its whole weight upon his independence, and relentlessly pursuing him, like an eternal irony. And he would see himself dead, and crumbling to dust, without hope of either resurrection or eternity. And he would strive to flee, yet would find no corner wherein to hide himself from all this hateful world. At length, in a frenzy of horror, he summoned all his energies, and gave a loud cry, and——