ed in his life.

On the evening of the same day, when the barracks were locked,
Raskolnikov lay on his plank bed and thought of her. He had even fancied
that day that all the convicts who had been his enemies looked at him
differently; he had even entered into talk with them and they answered
him in a friendly way. He remembered that now, and thought it was bound
to be so. Wasn't everything now bound to be changed?

He thought of her. He remembered how continually he had tormented her
and wounded her heart. He remembered her pale and thin little face.
But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what
infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings. And what were all,
_all_ the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence
and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an
external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not
think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have
analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped
into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself
out in his mind.

Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He took it up mechanically.
The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the
raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry
him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with
books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject
and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it
himself not long before his illness and she brought him the book without
a word. Till now he had not opened it.

He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: "Can
her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at
least...."

She too had been greatly agitated that day, and at night she was taken
ill again. But she was so happy--and so unexpectedly happy--that she was
almost frightened of her happiness. Seven years, _only_ seven years! At
the beginning of their happiness at some moments they were both ready
to look on those seven years as though they were seven days. He did not
know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would
have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great
suffering.

But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual
renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regenera