was such a point, and that now, now, he was left facing that point — and for the first time, indeed, during the last two months.

“Damn it all!” he thought suddenly, in a fit of ungovernable fury. “If it has begun, then it has begun. Hang the new life! Good Lord, how stupid it is!... And what lies I told to-day! How despicably I fawned upon that wretched Ilya Petrovitch! But that is all folly! What do I care for them all, and my fawning upon them! It is not that at all! It is not that at all!”

Suddenly he stopped; a new utterly unexpected and exceedingly simple question perplexed and bitterly confounded him.

“If it all has really been done deliberately and not idiotically, if I really had a certain and definite object, how is it I did not even glance into the purse and don’t