It was a wicked and cruel scheme, worked out to the smallest
particular. But, though I understood its hideousness intellectually, it
aroused in mo no corresponding emotion; my sensitiveness to right arid
wrong seemed stupefied or inoperative. I could say, "This is wicked,"
but I could not awaken in myself a horror of committing the wickedness;
and, moreover, I knew that, if the influence Paton was able to exercise
over me continued, I must in due time commit it.
Presently I became aware, or, to speak more accurately, I seemed to
remember, that there was something in Paton's room which it was
incumbent on me to procure. I went thither, lifted up a corner of the
rag between the bed and the stove, and beheld, in an aperture in the
floor, of the existence of which I had till now known nothing, the
antique poisoned dagger that Paton had showed me a few weeks before,
and which I had not seen since then. I brought it back to the sitting-
room, put it in a drawer of the table, and locked the drawer, at the
same time making a mental note to the effect that I should reopen the
drawer at a certain hour of the night and take the dagger out.
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