It must be so! It must be so! And if till to-day he has doubted it, now all is clear. Only Anti-Christ can give such orders.
Shall he return to the camp? Stain his hands, too, with the blood of these innocents?
"When the master speaks the servant must hearken," they say back home.
He must obey.
Something flashes in front of him like the flash of a gun.
"A bullet," he thinks.
"Would it were one!" he exclaims in the torment of his soul.
It is only a sun ray which suddenly shoots through the mist. But it has shown a poor mortal the right way.
They found the Raskolnik just outside the village—in his breast his own bullet, in his right hand the cross. On his lips the smile of peace that passeth understanding.