“How vile!” a loud voice cried suddenly in the doorway.

Pyotr Petrovitch looked round quickly.

“What vileness!” Lebeziatnikov repeated, staring him straight in the face.

Pyotr Petrovitch gave a positive start—all noticed it and recalled it afterwards. Lebeziatnikov strode into the room.

“And you dared to call me as witness?” he said, going up to Pyotr Petrovitch.

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?” muttered Luzhin.

“I mean that you... are a slanderer, that’s what my words mean!” Lebeziatnikov said hotly, looking sternly at him with his short-sighted eyes.

He was extremely angry. Raskolnikov gazed intently at him, as though seizing and weighing each word. Again there was a silence. Pyotr Petrovitch indeed seemed almost dumbfounded for the first moment.

“If you mean that for me,...” he began, stammering. “But what’s the matter with you? Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m in my mind, but you are a scoundrel! Ah, how vile! I have heard everything. I kept waiting on purpose to understand it, for I must own even now it is not quite logical.... What you have done it all for I can’t understand.”

“Why, what have I done then? Give over talking in your nonsensical riddles! Or maybe you are drunk!”

“You may be a drunkard, perhaps, vile man, but I am not! I never touch vodka, for it’s against my convictions. Would you believe it, he, he himself, with his own hands gave Sofya Semyonovna that hundred-rouble note—I saw it, I was a witness, I’ll take my oath! He did it, he!” repeated Lebeziatnikov, addressing all.

“Are you crazy, milksop?” squealed Luzhin. “She is herself before you—she herself here declared just now before everyone that I gave her only ten roubles. How could I have given it to her?”