"Dear Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, is it possible that there's such a danger hanging over me? I've been longing for you to come, to ask you." Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch laughed. "They certainly wouldn't let you go to Petersburg, even if I were to give you money for the journey.... But it's time for me to see Marya Timofyevna." And he got up from his chair. "Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, but how about Marya Timofyevna?" "Why, as I told you." "Can it be true?" "You still don't believe it?" "Will you really cast me off like an old worn-out shoe?" "I'll see," laughed Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch. "Come, let me go." "Wouldn't you like me to stand on the steps... for fear I might by chance overhear something... for the rooms are small?" "That's as well. Stand on the steps. Take my umbrella." "Your umbrella.... Am I worth it?" said the captain over-sweetly. "Anyone is worthy of an umbrella." "At one stroke you define the minimum of human rights...." But he was by now muttering mechanically. He was too much crushed by what he had learned, and was completely thrown out of his reckoning. And yet almost as soon as he had gone out on to the steps and had put up the umbrella, there his shallow and cunning brain caught again the ever-present, comforting idea that he was being cheated and deceived, and if so they were afraid of him, and there was no need for him to be afraid. "If they're lying and deceiving me, what's at the bottom of it?" was the thought that gnawed at his mind. The public announcement of the marriage seemed to him absurd. "It's true that with such a wonder-worker anything may come to pass; he lives to do harm. But what if he's afraid himself, since the insult of Sunday, and afraid as he's never been before? And so he's in a hurry to declare that he'll announce it himself, from fear that I should announce it. Eh, don't blunder, Lebyadkin! And why does he come on the sly, at night, if he means to make it public himself? And if he's afraid, it means that he's afraid now, at this moment, for these few days.... Eh, don't make a mistake, Lebyadkin! "He scares me with Pyotr Stepanovitch. Oy, I'm frightened, I'm frightened! Yes, this is what's so frightening! And what induced me to blab to Liputin. Goodness knows what these devils are up to. I never can make head or tail of it. Now they are all astir again as they were five years ago. To whom could I give information, indeed? 'Haven't I written to anyone in my foolishness?' H'm! So then I might write as though through foolishness? Isn't he giving me a hint? 'You're going to Petersburg on purpose.' The sly rogue. I've scarcely dreamed of it, and he guesses my dreams. As though he were putting me up to going himself. It's one or the other of two games he's up to. Either he's afraid because he's been up to some pranks himself... or he's not afraid for himself, but is simply egging me on to give them all away! Ach, it's terrible, Lebyadkin! Ach, you must not make a blunder!"