“After a minute I looked at my watch and noted the time with perfect accuracy. Why I should need to know the time so precisely I don’t know, but I was able to do it, and altogether at that moment I wanted to notice everything. So that I remember now what I noticed and see it as if it were before me. The evening drew on. A fly buzzed about my head and settled continually on my face. I caught it, held it in my fingers, and put it out of the window. Very loudly a van entered the courtyard below. Very loudly (and for some time before) a tailor, sitting at his window in the corner of the courtyard, sang a song. He sat at his work, and I could see him there. It struck me that, as nobody had met me when I passed through the gate and came upstairs, it was also, of course, not necessary that I should be seen now when I should be going downstairs; and I moved my chair from the window purposely so that I could not be seen by the lodgers. I took a book, but threw it away, and began looking at a tiny reddish spider on the leaf of a geranium, and I fell into a trance. I remember everything up to the last moment. “Suddenly I took out my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she went out of the room. The conjecture was assuming the shape of a probability. But I determined to wait precisely fifteen minutes more. It also crossed my mind that perhaps she had come back, and that I perhaps had not heard her. But that was impossible: there was a dead silence, and I could hear the hum of every small fly. Suddenly my heart began bounding again. I looked at my watch: it was three minutes short of the quarter. I sat them out, though my heart beat so as to hurt me. Then I got up, put on my hat, buttoned my overcoat, and looked round the room[39]—had I left any traces of my visit? I moved the chair closer to the window just as it had been before. At last I gently opened the door, locked it with my key, and went to the little box-room. It was closed, but not locked; I knew that it did not lock, but I did not want to open it, and I stood on tiptoe and began looking through the chink. At that moment, standing on tiptoe, I remembered that, when I sat by the window and looked at the little red spider and fell into a trance, I had been thinking of how I should stand on tiptoe and peer through this very chink. I mention this detail because I wish to prove fully to what an extent I was obviously in possession of my mental faculties and I hold myself responsible for everything. For a long time I peered through the chink, but it was dark there, but not absolutely, so that at last I saw what I wanted....[40] Footnote 39: After “room” is struck out: “to see if everything was in its place as before.” Footnote 40: After “what I wanted” is struck out: “I wanted all the while to be completely sure.”