“Last week? In the night? Have you gone cracked, my good friend?”
Hippolyte paused and considered a moment. Then a smile of cunning—almost triumph—crossed his lips.
“It was you,” he murmured, almost in a whisper, but with absolute conviction. “Yes, it was you who came to my room and sat silently on a chair at my window for a whole hour—more! It was between one and two at night; you rose and went out at about three. It was you , you ! Why you should have frightened me so, why you should have wished to torment me like that, I cannot tell—but you it was.”
There was absolute hatred in his eyes as he said this, but his look of fear and his trembling had not left him.
“You shall hear all this directly, gentlemen. I—I—listen!”
He seized his paper in a desperate hurry; he fidgeted with it, and tried to sort it, but for a long while his trembling hands could not collect the sheets together. “He’s either mad or delirious,” murmured Rogojin. At last he began.
For the first five minutes the reader’s voice continued to tremble, and he read disconnectedly and unevenly; but gradually his voice strengthened. Occasionally a violent fit of coughing stopped him, but his animation grew with the progress of the reading—as did also the disagreeable impression which it made upon his audience—until it reached the highest pitch of excitement.
Here is the article.
“Yesterday morning the prince came to see me. Among other things he asked me to come down to his villa. I knew he would come and persuade me to this step, and that he would adduce the argument that it would be easier for me