In such fervent and rapturous conversations we spent one evening after another. I even abandoned society and began visiting people much less frequently; besides, I was beginning to go out of fashion. I say that not in condemnation, for people went on loving me and receiving me cheerfully, but still one must admit that fashion is indeed the great queen of society. As for my mysterious visitor, I came finally to regard him with admiration, for, besides enjoying his intelligence, I began to feel that he was nursing some sort of design in himself, and was perhaps preparing for a great deed. Perhaps he liked it, too, that I did not express any curiosity about his secret, and did not question him either directly or through hints. But at last I noticed that he himself seemed to be longing to reveal something to me. In any case this became quite apparent about a month after the start of his visits. “Do you know,” he once asked me, “that there is great curiosity in town about the two of us? People marvel that I come to see you so often; but let them marvel, for soon everything will be explained.”Sometimes a great agitation suddenly came over him, and on such occasions he almost always would get up and leave. And sometimes he would look at me long and piercingly, as it were—I would think, “Now he is going to say something,” but suddenly he would catch himself and start talking about something familiar and ordinary. He also began to complain frequently of headaches. And then one day, even quite unexpectedly, after talking long and fervently, I saw him suddenly grow pale, his face became quite twisted, and he stared straight at me.

“What’s the matter?” I said, “are you ill?”

He had been complaining precisely of a headache.

“I ... do you know ... I killed a person.”

He said it and smiled, and his face was white as chalk. “Why is he smiling?” the thought suddenly pierced my heart even before I had understood anything. I turned pale myself.

“What are you saying?” I cried to him.

“You see,” he replied, still with a pale smile, “how much it cost me to say the first word. Now I have said it, and, it seems, have set out on the path. I shall keep on.”

For a while I did not believe him, nor did I believe him at once, but only after he had come to me for three days and told me everything in detail. I thought he was mad, but ended finally by being convinced clearly, to my great grief and astonishment. He had committed a great and terrible crime fourteen years earlier, over a wealthy lady, young and beautiful, a landowner’s widow, who kept her own house in our town. Feeling great love for her, he made her a declaration of his love, and tried to persuade her to marry him. But she had already given her heart to another man, an officer of noble birth and high rank, who was then away on campaign, but whom she expected soon to return to her. She rejected his proposal and asked him to stop visiting her. He did stop visiting her, but knowing the layout of her house, he came to her by stealth one night from the garden, over the roof, with great boldness, risking discovery. But, as so often happens, crimes committed with extraordinary boldness are more likely to succeed than any others. Having entered the attic through a dormer window, he went down to her apartments by the little attic stairway, knowing that, because of the servants’ negligence, the door at the foot of the stairway was not always locked. He hoped for such carelessness this time, and was not disappointed. Stealing into her apartments, he made his way through the darkness to her bedroom, where an icon lamp was burning. Her two maids, as if on purpose, had gone secretly, without asking permission, to a birthday party at a neighbor’s house on the same street. The other menservants and maids slept in the servants’ quarters or in the kitchen on the ground floor. At the sight of the sleeping woman, passion flared up in him, and then his heart was seized by vengeful, jealous anger, and forgetting himself, like a drunk man, he went up to her and plunged a knife straight into her heart, so that she did not even cry out. Then, with infernal and criminal calculation, he arranged things so that the blame would fall on the servants: he did not scruple to take her purse; with her keys, taken from under her pillow, he opened her bureau and took certain things from it, precisely as an ignorant servant would have done, leaving the valuable papers and taking only money; he took some of the larger gold objects and neglected smaller objects that were ten times more valuable. He also took something for himself as a keepsake, but of that later. Having carried out this horrible deed, he left by the same way he had come. Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor ever in his whole life afterwards, did it occur to anyone to suspect the real culprit! Besides, no one knew of his love for her, for he had always been of taciturn and unsociable character and had no friend to whom he confided his soul. He was considered merely an acquaintance of the murdered woman, and not a very close one at that, for he had not even called on her for the past two weeks. Her serf Pyotr was the immediate suspect, and circumstances all came together just then to confirm the suspicion, for this servant knew, and the dead woman had made no secret of it, that she intended to send him to the army, to fulfill her quota of peasant recruits, because he had no family and, besides, was badly behaved. He had been heard, angry and drunk, in a tavern, threatening to kill her. And two days before her death he had run away and lived somewhere in town, no one knew where. The very day after the murder, he was found on the road just outside town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket and, what’s more, with his right palm for some reason stained with blood. He insisted that his nose had been bleeding, but no one believed him. The maids confessed that they had gone to a party, and that the front door had been left unlocked until their return. And on top of that there were many similar indications, on the basis of which they seized the innocent servant. He was arrested, and proceedings were started, but just a week later the arrested man came down with a fever and died unconscious in the hospital. Thus the case was closed, handed over to the will of God, and everyone—the judges, the authorities, and society at large—remained convinced that the crime had been committed by no one other than the dead servant. And after that the punishment began.

The mysterious visitor, by now my friend, divulged to me that at first he had even suffered no remorse at all. He did suffer for a long time, not from that, but from regret that he had killed the woman he loved, that she was no more, that having killed her, he had killed his love, while the fire of passion was still in his veins. But he gave almost no thought then to the blood he had shed, to the murder of a human being. The idea that his victim might have become another man’s wife seemed impossible to him, and thus for a long time he was convinced in his conscience that he could not have acted otherwise. The arrest of the servant caused him some anguish at first, but the speedy illness and then death of the arrested man set his mind at ease, for by all evidence he had died (so he reasoned then) not from the arrest or from fear, but from the chill he had caught precisely during his fugitive days, when he had lain, dead drunk, all night on the damp ground. And the stolen articles and money troubled him little, because (he kept reasoning in the same way) the theft had been committed not for gain but to divert suspicion elsewhere. The sum stolen was insignificant, and he soon donated the entire sum and even much more for the almshouse that was being established in our town. He did so on purpose to ease his conscience regarding the theft, and, remarkably, he did indeed feel eased for a time, even for a long time—he told me so himself. Then he threw himself into great official activity, took upon himself a troublesome and difficult assignment, which occupied him for about two years, and, being of strong character, almost forgot what had happened; and when he did remember, he tried not to give it any thought. He also threw himself into philanthropic work, gave and organized a great deal in our town, became known in the capitals, was elected a member of philanthropic societies in Moscow and Petersburg. Nevertheless, he fell to brooding at last, and the torment was more than he was able to bear. Just then he became attracted to a wonderful and sensible girl, and in a short time he married her, dreaming that marriage would dispel his solitary anguish, and that, entering upon a new path and zealously fulfilling his duty towards wife and children, he would escape his old memories altogether. But what happened was exactly the opposite of this expectation. Already in the first month of marriage, a ceaseless thought began troubling him: “So my wife loves me, but what if she found out?” When she became pregnant with their first child and told him of it, he suddenly became troubled: “I am giving life, but I have taken a life.” They had children: “How dare I love, teach, and raise them, how shall I speak to them of virtue: I have shed blood.” They were wonderful children, one longed to caress them: “And I cannot look at their innocent, bright faces; I am unworthy.” Finally the blood of the murdered victim began to appear to him, menacingly and bitterly, her destroyed young life, her blood crying out for revenge. He began to have horrible dreams. But, being stouthearted, he endured the torment for a long time: “I shall atone for it all with my secret torment.” But that hope, too, was vain: the longer it went on, the more intense his suffering grew. He came to be respected in society for his philanthropic activity, though everyone was afraid of his stern and gloomy character, but the more respected he became, the more unbearable it was for him. He confessed to me that he had thought of killing himself. But instead of that he began to picture a different dream—a dream he at first considered impossible and insane, but which stuck so fast to his heart that he was unable to shake it off. His dream was this: he would rise up, go out in front of people, and tell them all that he had killed a person. For about three years he lived with this dream, he kept picturing it in various forms. Finally he came to believe with his whole heart that, having told his crime, he would undoubtedly heal his soul and find peace once and for all. But, believing that, he felt terror in his heart, for how could it be carried out? And suddenly there occurred that incident at my duel. “Looking at you, I have now made up my mind.” I looked at him.