Having then carefully locked himself in, he opened the little cupboard where his razors were kept, and took out “the” razor. There was still some of the blood on the bone handle. He put the razor back again, and locked the cupboard. He was sleepy; he felt that he must go to sleep as speedily as possible, otherwise he would be useless “for to-morrow,” and to-morrow seemed to him for some reason or other to be about to be a fateful day for him. But all those thoughts which had crowded in upon him all day, and had never left him for a moment, were still in full swing within his brain; he thought, and thought, and thought, and could not fall asleep. If Pavel Pavlovitch arrived at murdering point accidentally, had he ever seriously thought of murder even for a single evil instant before? Velchaninoff decided the question strangely enough: Pavel Pavlovitch _had_ the desire to murder him, but did not himself know of the existence of this desire. “It seems an absurd conclusion; but so it is!” thought Velchaninoff. Pavel Pavlovitch did not come to Petersburg to look out for a new appointment, nor did he come for the sake of finding Bagantoff, in spite of his rage when the latter died. No! he despised Bagantoff thoroughly. Pavel Pavlovitch had come to St. Petersburg for _him_, and had brought Liza with him, for him alone, Velchaninoff. “Did _I_ expect to have my throat cut?” Velchaninoff decided that he _had_ expected it, from the moment when he saw Pavel Pavlovitch in the carriage following in Bagantoff’s funeral procession. “That is I expected something—of course, not exactly to have my throat cut! And surely—surely, it was not all _bonâ fide_ yesterday,” he reflected, raising his head from the pillow in the excitement of the idea. “_Surely_ it cannot have been all in good faith that that fellow assured me of his love for me, beating his breast, and with his under lip trembling, as he spoke! “Yes, it was absolutely _bonâ fide_!” he decided. “This quasimodo of T—— was quite good enough and generous enough to fall in love with his wife’s lover—his wife in whom he never observed ’anything’ during the twenty years of their married life. “He respected and loved me for nine years, and remembered both me and my sayings. My goodness, to think of that! and I knew nothing whatever of all this! Oh, no! he was not lying yesterday! But did he love me _while_ he declared his love for me, and said that we must be ‘quits!’ Yes, he did, he loved me spitefully—and spiteful love is sometimes the strongest of all.