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‘It’s all forgotten between us, isn’t it?’ he said in a friendly voice.

I looked at his blanched face, at the blood-stained handkerchief, and utterly confounded, put to shame, and annihilated, I pressed his hand.

‘Gentlemen!’ he added, turning to the seconds, ‘everything, I hope, will be kept secret?’

‘Of course!’ cried Koloberdyaev; ‘but, prince, allow me …’

And he himself bound up his head.

The prince, as he went away, bowed to me once more. But Bizmyonkov did not even glance at me. Shattered–morally shattered–went homewards with Koloberdyaev.

‘Why, what’s the matter with you?’ the cavalry captain asked me. ‘Set your mind at rest; the wound’s not serious. He’ll be able to dance by to-morrow, if you like. Or are you sorry you didn’t kill him? You’re wrong, if you are; he’s a first-rate fellow.’

‘What business had he to spare me!’ I muttered at last.

‘Oh, so that’s it!’ the cavalry captain rejoined tranquilly… ‘Ugh, you writing fellows are too much for me!’

I don’t know what put it into his head to consider me an author.

I absolutely decline to describe my torments during the evening following upon that luckless duel. My vanity suffered indescribably. It was not my conscience that tortured me; the consciousness of my imbecility crushed me. ‘I have given myself the last decisive blow by my own act!’ I kept repeating, as I strode up and down my room. ‘The prince, wounded by me, and forgiving me… Yes, Liza is now his. Now nothing can save her, nothing can hold her back on the edge of the abyss.’ I knew very well that our duel could not be kept secret, in spite of the prince’s words; in any case, it could not remain a secret for Liza.

‘The prince is not such a fool,’ I murmured in a frenzy of rage, ‘as not to profit by it.’… But, meanwhile, I was mistaken. The whole town knew of the duel and of its real cause next day, of course. But the prince had not blabbed of it; on the contrary, when, with his head bandaged and an explanation ready, he made his appearance before Liza, she had already heard everything…. Whether Bizmyonkov had betrayed me, or the news had reached her by other channels, I cannot say. Though, indeed, can anything ever be concealed in a little town? You can fancy how Liza received him, how all the family of the Ozhogins received him! As for me, I suddenly became an object of universal indignation and loathing, a monster, a jealous bloodthirsty madman. My few acquaintances shunned me as if I were a leper. The authorities of the town promptly addressed the prince, with a proposal to punish me in a severe and befitting manner. Nothing but the persistent and urgent entreaties of the prince himself averted the calamity that menaced me. That man was fated to annihilate me in every way. By his generosity he had shut, as it were, a coffin-lid down upon me. It’s needless to say that the Ozhogins’ doors were at once closed against me. Kirilla Matveitch even sent me back a bit of pencil I had left in his house. In reality, he, of all people, had no reason to be angry with me. My ‘insane’ (that was the expression current in the town) jealousy had pointed out, defined, so to speak, the relations of the prince to Liza. Both the old Ozhogins themselves and their fellow-citizens began to look on him almost as betrothed to her. This could not, as a fact, have been quite to his liking. But he was greatly attracted by Liza; and meanwhile, he had not at that time attained his aims. With all the adroitness of a clever man of the world, he took advantage of his new position, and promptly entered, as they say, into the spirit of his new part….

But I!… For myself, for my future, I renounced all hopes, at that time. When suffering reaches the point of making our whole being creak and groan, like an overloaded cart, it ought to cease to be ridiculous … but no! laughter not only accompanies tears to the end, to exhaustion, to the impossibility of shedding more–it even rings and echoes, where the tongue is dumb, and complaint itself is dead…. And so, as in the first place I don’t intend to expose myself as ridiculous, even to myself, and secondly as I am fearfully tired, I will put off the continuation, and please God the conclusion, of my story till tomorrow….