quite different anxiety arose, a new, incidental, but yet fatal and
insoluble difficulty presented itself.

If she were to say to him: "I'm yours; take me away," how could he take
her away? Where had he the means, the money to do it? It was just at this
time that all sources of revenue from Fyodor Pavlovitch, doles which had
gone on without interruption for so many years, ceased. Grushenka had
money, of course, but with regard to this Mitya suddenly evinced
extraordinary pride; he wanted to carry her away and begin the new life
with her himself, at his own expense, not at hers. He could not conceive
of taking her money, and the very idea caused him a pang of intense
repulsion. I won't enlarge on this fact or analyze it here, but confine
myself to remarking that this was his attitude at the moment. All this may
have arisen indirectly and unconsciously from the secret stings of his
conscience for the money of Katerina Ivanovna that he had dishonestly
appropriated. "I've been a scoundrel to one of them, and I shall be a
scoundrel again to the other directly," was his feeling then, as he
explained after: "and when Grushenka knows, she won't care for such a
scoundrel."

Where then was he to get the means, where was he to get the fateful money?
Without it, all would be lost and nothing could be done, "and only because
I hadn't the money. Oh, the shame of it!"

To anticipate things: he did, perhaps, know where to get the money, knew,
perhaps, where it lay at that moment. I will say no more of this here, as
it will all be clear later. But his chief trouble, I must explain however
obscurely, lay in the fact that to have that sum he knew of, to _have the
right_ to take it, he must first restore Katerina Ivanovna's three
thousand--if not, "I'm a common pickpocket, I'm a scoundrel, and I don't
want to begin a new life as a scoundrel," Mitya decided. And so he made up
his mind to move heaven and earth to return Katerina Ivanovna that three
thousand, and that _first of all_. The final stage of this decision, so to
say, had been reached only during the last hours, that is, after his last
interview with Alyosha, two days before, on the high-road, on the evening
when Grushenka had insulted Katerina Ivanovna, and Mitya, after hearing
Alyosha's account of it, had admitted that he was a scoundrel, and told
him to tell Katerina Ivanovna so, if it could be any comfort to her. After
parting from his brother on that night, he had felt in his