e how
he would kill his father! But the other one is ill, he is ill, he is
delirious!" she kept crying out, beside herself.

The court usher took the document she held out to the President, and she,
dropping into her chair, hiding her face in her hands, began convulsively
and noiselessly sobbing, shaking all over, and stifling every sound for
fear she should be ejected from the court. The document she had handed up
was that letter Mitya had written at the "Metropolis" tavern, which Ivan
had spoken of as a "mathematical proof." Alas! its mathematical
conclusiveness was recognized, and had it not been for that letter, Mitya
might have escaped his doom or, at least, that doom would have been less
terrible. It was, I repeat, difficult to notice every detail. What
followed is still confused to my mind. The President must, I suppose, have
at once passed on the document to the judges, the jury, and the lawyers on
both sides. I only remember how they began examining the witness. On being
gently asked by the President whether she had recovered sufficiently,
Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed impetuously:

"I am ready, I am ready! I am quite equal to answering you," she added,
evidently still afraid that she would somehow be prevented from giving
evidence. She was asked to explain in detail what this letter was and
under what circumstances she received it.

"I received it the day before the crime was committed, but he wrote it the
day before that, at the tavern--that is, two days before he committed the
crime. Look, it is written on some sort of bill!" she cried breathlessly.
"He hated me at that time, because he had behaved contemptibly and was
running after that creature ... and because he owed me that three
thousand.... Oh! he was humiliated by that three thousand on account of
his own meanness! This is how it happened about that three thousand. I beg
you, I beseech you, to hear me. Three weeks before he murdered his father,
he came to me one morning. I knew he was in want of money, and what he
wanted it for. Yes, yes--to win that creature and carry her off. I knew
then that he had been false to me and meant to abandon me, and it was I,
I, who gave him that money, who offered it to him on the pretext of his
sending it to my sister in Moscow. And as I gave it him, I looked him in
the face and said that he could send it when he liked, 'in a month's time
would do.' How, how could he have failed to understand that I was
practically tel