k and looked at her with a mournful smile.

"You are a strange girl, Sonia--you kiss me and hug me when I tell you
about that.... You don't think what you are doing."

"There is no one--no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!" she
cried in a frenzy, not hearing what he said, and she suddenly broke into
violent hysterical weeping.

A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at
once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes
and hung on his eyelashes.

"Then you won't leave me, Sonia?" he said, looking at her almost with
hope.

"No, no, never, nowhere!" cried Sonia. "I will follow you, I will follow
you everywhere. Oh, my God! Oh, how miserable I am!... Why, why didn't I
know you before! Why didn't you come before? Oh, dear!"

"Here I have come."

"Yes, now! What's to be done now?... Together, together!" she repeated
as it were unconsciously, and she hugged him again. "I'll follow you to
Siberia!"

He recoiled at this, and the same hostile, almost haughty smile came to
his lips.

"Perhaps I don't want to go to Siberia yet, Sonia," he said.

Sonia looked at him quickly.

Again after her first passionate, agonising sympathy for the unhappy man
the terrible idea of the murder overwhelmed her. In his changed tone she
seemed to hear the murderer speaking. She looked at him bewildered. She
knew nothing as yet, why, how, with what object it had been. Now all
these questions rushed at once into her mind. And again she could not
believe it: "He, he is a murderer! Could it be true?"

"What's the meaning of it? Where am I?" she said in complete
bewilderment, as though still unable to recover herself. "How could you,
you, a man like you.... How could you bring yourself to it?... What does
it mean?"

"Oh, well--to plunder. Leave off, Sonia," he answered wearily, almost
with vexation.

Sonia stood as though struck dumb, but suddenly she cried:

"You were hungry! It was... to help your mother? Yes?"

"No, Sonia, no," he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. "I was
not so hungry.... I certainly did want to help my mother, but... that's
not the real thing either.... Don't torture me, Sonia."

Sonia clasped her hands.

"Could it, could it all be true? Good God, what a truth! Who could
believe it? And how could you give away your last farthing and yet
rob and murder! Ah," she cried suddenly, "that money you gave Katerina
Ivanovna... that money.... Can that