"Is Nastasya Filippovna at your house?"
"Yes."
"And was it you who looked at me from behind the curtain earlier?"
"It was . . ."
"Then why did you . . ."
But the prince did not know what to ask further and how to finish the question; besides, his heart was pounding so hard that it was difficult for him even to speak. Rogozhin was also silent and looked at him as before, that is, as if pensively.
"Well, I'm going," he said suddenly, preparing to cross the street again, "and you go, too. Let's stay separated in the street . . . it's better for us that way ... on different sides . . . you'll see."
When they finally turned from two different sidewalks onto Gorokhovaya and approached Rogozhin's house, the prince's legs again began to give way under him, so that he had difficulty walking. It was nearly ten o'clock in the evening. The windows on the old lady's side were open as before, Rogozhin's were closed, and the drawn white blinds seemed to have become still more noticeable in the twilight. The prince came up to the house from the opposite sidewalk; Rogozhin stepped onto the porch from his sidewalk and waved his hand to him. The prince went up to him on the porch.
"Even the caretaker doesn't know about me now, that I've come back home. I told him earlier that I was going to Pavlovsk, and I said the same thing at my mother's," he whispered with a sly and almost contented smile. "We'll go in and nobody'll hear."
He already had the key in his hand. Going up the stairs, he turned and shook his finger at the prince to step more quietly, quietly opened the door to his rooms, let the prince in, carefully came in after him, locked the door behind him, and put the key in his pocket.
"Let's go," he said in a whisper.
He had begun speaking in a whisper still on the sidewalk in Liteinaya. Despite all his external calm, he was in some deep inner anguish. When they entered the big room, just before his study, he went up to the window and beckoned mysteriously to the prince:
"So when you rang my bell earlier, I guessed straight off that it was you all right; I tiptoed to the door and heard you talking with Pafnutyevna, and I'd already been telling her at dawn: if you, or somebody from you, or anybody else starts knocking at my door, she shouldn't tell about me under any pretext; and especially if you came asking for me yourself, and I told her your name. And then, when you left, it occurred to me: what if he's standing there now and spying on me, or watching from the street? I went up to this
same window, raised the curtain a bit, looked, and you were standing there looking straight at me . . . That's how it was."
"And where is . . . Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince brought out breathlessly.
"She's . . . here," Rogozhin said slowly, as if waiting a bit before he answered.
"But where?"
Rogozhin raised his eyes to the prince and looked at him intently:
Let's go . . .
He kept speaking in a whisper and without hurrying, slowly and, as before, with some strange pensiveness. Even when he was telling about the curtain, it was as if he wanted to express something different with his story, despite all the expansiveness of the telling.
They went into the study. A certain change had taken place in this room since the prince had been there: a green silk damask curtain was stretched across the whole room, with openings at both ends, separating the study from the alcove in which Rogozhin's bed was set up. The heavy curtain was drawn and the openings were closed. But it was very dark in the room; the Petersburg "white" summer nights were beginning to turn darker, and if it had not been for the full moon, it would have been difficult to see anything in Rogozhin's dark rooms with the blinds drawn. True, it was still possible to make out faces, though not very clearly. Rogozhin's face was very pale, as usual; his eyes looked intently at the prince, with a strong gleam, but somehow motionlessly.
"Why don't you light a candle?" asked the prince.
"No, better not," Rogozhin replied and, taking the prince by the hand, he bent him down onto a chair; he sat down facing him and moved the chair so that his knees almost touched the prince's. Between them, a little to the side, was a small, round table. "Sit down, let's sit a while!" he said, as if persuading him to sit down. They were silent for a minute. "I just knew you'd stay in that same inn," he began, as people sometimes do, approaching the main conversation by starting with extraneous details, not directly related to the matter. "As soon as I stepped into the corridor, I thought: maybe he's sitting and waiting for me now, like me him, this same minute? Did you go to the teacher's widow's?"
"I did," the prince could barely speak for the strong pounding of his heart.
"I thought about that, too. There'll be talk, I thought . . . and then I thought: I'll bring him here to spend the night, so that this night together . . ."
"Rogozhin! Where is Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince suddenly whispered and stood up, trembling in every limb. Rogozhin got up, too.
"There," he whispered, nodding towards the curtain.
"Asleep?" whispered the prince.
Again Rogozhin looked at him intently, as earlier.
"Okay, let's go! . . . Only you . . . Well, let's go!"
He raised the curtain, stopped, and again turned to the prince.
"Come in!" he nodded towards the opening, inviting him to go first. The prince went in.
"It's dark here," he said.
"You can see!" Rogozhin muttered.
"I can barely see . . . the bed."
"Go closer," Rogozhin suggested quietly.
The prince took one step closer, then another, and stopped. He stood and peered for a minute or two; neither man said anything all the while they were there by the bed; the prince's heart was pounding so that it seemed audible in the dead silence of the room. But his eyes were accustomed now, so that he could make out the whole bed; someone was sleeping there, a completely motionless sleep; not the slightest rustle, not the slightest breath could be heard. The sleeper was covered from head to foot with a white sheet, but the limbs were somehow vaguely outlined; one could only see by the raised form that a person lay stretched out there. Scattered in disorder on the bed, at its foot, on the chair next to the bed, even on the floor, were the taken-off clothes, a costly white silk dress, flowers, ribbons. On the little table by the head of the bed, the taken-off and scattered diamonds sparkled. At the foot of the bed some lace lay crumpled in a heap, and against this white lace, peeping from under the sheet, the tip of a bare foot was outlined; it seemed carved from marble and was terribly still. The prince looked and felt that the more he looked, the more dead and quiet the room became. Suddenly an awakened fly buzzed, flew over the bed, and alighted by its head. The prince gave a start.
"Let's get out," Rogozhin touched his arm.
They went out, sat down again in the same chairs, again facing each other. The prince was trembling more and more, and did not take his questioning eyes off Rogozhin's face.