ppen?" said Sonia reluctantly.

"Then it would be better for Luzhin to go on living and doing wicked
things? You haven't dared to decide even that!"

"But I can't know the Divine Providence.... And why do you ask what
can't be answered? What's the use of such foolish questions? How could
it happen that it should depend on my decision--who has made me a judge
to decide who is to live and who is not to live?"

"Oh, if the Divine Providence is to be mixed up in it, there is no doing
anything," Raskolnikov grumbled morosely.

"You'd better say straight out what you want!" Sonia cried in distress.
"You are leading up to something again.... Can you have come simply to
torture me?"

She could not control herself and began crying bitterly. He looked at
her in gloomy misery. Five minutes passed.

"Of course you're right, Sonia," he said softly at last. He was suddenly
changed. His tone of assumed arrogance and helpless defiance was gone.
Even his voice was suddenly weak. "I told you yesterday that I was not
coming to ask forgiveness and almost the first thing I've said is to ask
forgiveness.... I said that about Luzhin and Providence for my own sake.
I was asking forgiveness, Sonia...."

He tried to smile, but there was something helpless and incomplete in
his pale smile. He bowed his head and hid his face in his hands.

And suddenly a strange, surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred
for Sonia passed through his heart. As it were wondering and frightened
of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he
met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him; there was
love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real
feeling; he had taken the one feeling for the other. It only meant that
_that_ minute had come.

He hid his face in his hands again and bowed his head. Suddenly he
turned pale, got up from his chair, looked at Sonia, and without
uttering a word sat down mechanically on her bed.

His sensations that moment were terribly like the moment when he had
stood over the old woman with the axe in his hand and felt that "he must
not lose another minute."

"What's the matter?" asked Sonia, dreadfully frightened.

He could not utter a word. This was not at all, not at all the way he
had intended to "tell" and he did not understand what was happening to
him now. She went up to him, softly, sat down on the bed beside him and
waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her h