incessantly, as I lay, like a dead man, on my back, and with my hands folded on my breast:--"Can it be?".... How do you like that "Can it be?" March 26. A thaw. When, on the following day, after long hesitation and inward quailing, I entered the familiar drawing-room of the Ozhógins', I was no longer the same man whom they had known for the space of three weeks. All my former habits, from which I had begun to wean myself under the influence of an emotion which was new to me, had suddenly made their appearance again, and taken entire possession of me like the owners returning to their house. People like myself are generally guided not so much by positive facts, as by their own impressions; I, who, no longer ago than the previous evening, had been dreaming of "the raptures of mutual love," to-day cherished not the slightest doubt as to my own "unhappiness," and was in utter despair, although I myself was not able to discover any reasonable pretext for my despair. I could not be jealous of Prince N***, and whatever merits he might possess, his mere arrival was not sufficient instantly to extirpate Liza's inclination for me.... But stay!--did that inclination exist? I recalled the past. "And the stroll in the forest?" I asked myself. "And the expression of her face in the mirror?"--"But," I went on,--"the stroll in the forest, apparently.... Phew, good heavens! What an insignificant being I am!" I exclaimed aloud, at last. This is a specimen of the half-expressed, half-thought ideas which, returning a thousand times, revolved in a monotonous whirlwind in my head. I repeat,--I returned to the Ozhógins' the same mistrustful, suspicious, constrained person that I had been from my childhood....