“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 money …”

“No, Sonia,” he broke in hurriedly, “that money was not it. Don’t worry yourself! That money my mother sent me and it came when I was ill, the day I gave it to you. … Razumihin saw it … he received it for me. … That money was mine—my own.”

Sonia listened to him in bewilderment and did her utmost to comprehend.