He awoke to find himself bathed in sweat, with, around him, a silence as of death. Everywhere the darkness was profound. Yet still the old woman’s story seemed to be going on somewhere; still there seemed to be in progress an interminable narrative, with the narrator’s hoarse voice ringing familiarly to Ordynov’s ear. The narrative was about a dark forest, and daring brigands, and a gallant leader of the type of Stenka Razin,³ and that gallant leader’s companions, and boatmen of the Volga, and a beautiful girl, and Mother Volga herself. Was it all an illusion? Did he hear aright? Fully an hour passed while he lay listening, with distended eyes, and held by a motionless, a painful, spell. At length he raised himself cautiously, and rejoiced to find himself strong with a strength which his grievous illness had failed to destroy. The delirium was gone, and reality had come in its place. He could see that he was still wearing the same clothes as he had been wearing when he last talked to Katerina; whence he arrived at the conclusion that no very great space of time could have elapsed since the morning when she left him. Also, a fever of longing was burning in his blood. Feeling his way cautiously along the wall, he soon came upon a large nail, fixed at a high point in the partition-wall against which his bed was placed. Clutching the nail with both hands, he then contrived to draw himself up until he had reached a crack through which there filtered a feeble light into the room; after which, applying his eye to this crack, he held his breath, and proceeded guardedly to take observations.

In a corner of his landlord’s room was a bed, with, in front of it, a table, covered over with a cloth on which there were heaped great books of antique shape, bound like missals. To the wall above the bed there was nailed an ikon which, in point of age, could almost vie with the one in Ordynov’s room; while before the ikon there burnt a lamp. Upon the bed was stretched Murin. Looking ill and as white as a sheet, he had his limbs covered over with a fur coat, and his knees were supporting an open book. Beside him on a bench was stretched Katerina, with one of her arms around the old man’s neck, and her head resting against his shoulder. From time to time she would look at him with eyes which shone with an almost childlike interest—so much so that the curiosity with which she was listening to his reading seemed to be absolutely boundless. Now and then the old man would raise his voice a little, and a trace of animation would show itself in his inert figure as, with a frown, and with his eyes shooting flashes, he would make Katerina begin to quiver with fear. Then something like a smile would dawn upon his features, and Katerina would smile sweetly in return; while at other times glittering tears would come welling to her eyes, and then the old man would caress her like a child, and she would press him closer to herself with her bare, white arm, and loll her head lovingly upon his bosom.