“Guess,” he said, with his former twisted and powerless smile.

It was as if a shudder ran through her whole body.

“But you...I... why do you...frighten me so?” she said, smiling like a child.

“I must be a great friend of his...since I know,” Raskolnikov went on, still looking relentlessly in her face, as if he were no longer able to take his eyes away. “This Lizaveta...he didn't want to kill her...He killed her...accidentally...He wanted to kill the old woman...when she was alone...and he went there...And then Lizaveta came in...Then he...killed her, too.”

Another terrible minute passed. They both went on looking at each other.

“So you can't guess?” he suddenly asked, feeling as if he were throwing himself from a bell-tower.

“N-no,” Sonya whispered, barely audibly.

“Take a good look.”

Again, as soon as he said this, a former, familiar sensation suddenly turned his soul to ice: he looked at her, and suddenly in her face he seemed to see the face of Lizaveta. He vividly recalled the expression of Lizaveta's face as he was approaching her with the axe and she was backing away from him towards the wall, her hand held out, with a completely childlike fright on her face, exactly as when little children suddenly begin to be frightened of something, stare fixedly and uneasily at what frightens them, back away, and, holding out a little hand, are preparing to cry. Almost the same thing now happened with Sonya as well: just as powerlessly, with the same fright, she looked at him for a time; then suddenly, holding out her left hand, she rested her fingers barely, lightly, on his chest, and slowly began to get up from the bed, backing farther and farther away from him, while looking at him more and more fixedly. Her terror suddenly communicated itself to him: exactly the same fright showed on his face as well; he began looking at her in exactly the same way, and even with almost the same childlike smile.

“You've guessed?” he whispered at last.

“Lord!” a terrible cry tore itself from her breast. Powerlessly she fell onto the bed, face down on the pillows. But after a moment she quickly got up again, quickly moved closer to him, seized both his hands, and, squeezing them tightly with her thin fingers, as in a vise, again began looking fixedly in his face, as though her eyes were glued to him. With this last, desperate look she wanted to seek out and catch hold of at least some last hope for herself. But there was no hope; no doubt remained; it was all so! Even later, afterwards, when she remembered this moment, she found it both strange and wondrous: precisely why had she seen at once that there was no longer any doubt? She could not really say, for instance, that she had anticipated anything of the sort. And yet now, as soon as he told her, it suddenly seemed to her that she really had anticipated this very thing.

“Come, Sonya, enough! Don't torment me!” he begged with suffering.

This was not the way, this was not at all the way he had intended to reveal it to her, but thus it came out.

As if forgetting herself, she jumped up and, wringing her hands, walked halfway across the room; but she came back quickly and sat down again beside him, almost touching him, shoulder to shoulder. All at once, as if pierced, she gave a start, cried out, and, not knowing why, threw herself on her knees before him.

“What, what have you done to yourself!” she said desperately, and, jumping up from her knees, threw herself on his neck, embraced him, and pressed him very, very tightly in her arms.

Raskolnikov recoiled and looked at her with a sad smile.

“You're so strange, Sonya—you embrace me and kiss me, when I've just told you about that. You're forgetting yourself.”

“No one, no one in the whole world, is unhappier than you are now!” she exclaimed, as if in a frenzy, not hearing his remark, and suddenly burst into sobs, as if in hysterics.

A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his soul and softened it all at once. He did not resist: two tears rolled from his eyes and hung on his lashes.

“So you won't leave me, Sonya?” he said, looking at her almost with hope.

“No, no, never, not anywhere!” Sonya cried out. “I'll follow you, I'll go wherever you go! Oh, Lord! ... Ah, wretched me! ... Why, why didn't I know you before! Why didn't you come before? Oh, Lord!”

“Well, so I've come.”

“Now you've come! Oh, what's to be done now! ... Together, together!” she kept repeating, as if oblivious, and again she embraced him. “I'll go to hard labor with you!” He suddenly seemed to flinch; the former hateful and almost arrogant smile forced itself to his lips.

“But maybe I don't want to go to hard labor, Sonya,” he said.

Sonya glanced at him quickly.

After her first passionate and tormenting sympathy for the unhappy man, the horrible idea of the murder struck her again. In the changed tone of his words she suddenly could hear the murderer. She looked at him in amazement. As yet she knew nothing of why, or how, or for what it had been. Now all these questions flared up at once in her consciousness. And again she did not believe it: “He, he a murderer? Is it really possible?”

“What is this! Where am I!” she said, deeply perplexed, as if she had still not come to her senses. “But you, you, you're so...how could you make yourself do it?...What is this!”

“To rob her, of course. Stop it, Sonya!” he replied somehow wearily, and as if with vexation.

Sonya stood as if stunned, but suddenly exclaimed:

“You were hungry! You...it was to help your mother? Yes?”

“No, Sonya, no,” he murmured, turning away and hanging his head. “I wasn't so hungry...I did want to help my mother, but...that's not quite right either...don't torment me, Sonya!”

Sonya clasped her hands.

“But can it be, can it be that it's all actually true? Lord, what sort of truth is this! Who can believe it?...And how is it, how is it that you could give away your last penny, and yet kill in order to rob! Ahh! . . .” she suddenly cried out, “that money you gave to Katerina Ivanovna...that money...Lord, was that the same money . . .”

“No, Sonya,” he interrupted hastily, “don't worry, it wasn't the same money! That was money my mother sent to me, through a merchant; it came when I was sick, and I gave it away the same day...Razumikhin saw...it was he who received it for me...it was my money, my own, really mine.”

Sonya listened to him in perplexity and tried as hard as she could to understand something.

“And that money...though I don't even know if there was any money,” he added softly and as if pensively. “I took a purse from around her neck then, a suede purse...a fat one, stuffed full...but I didn't look inside, I must not have had time... And the things—there were just some cuff-links and little chains—I buried all the things along with the purse under a stone in some unknown courtyard on V------y Prospect, the very next morning...It's all still there . . .”

Sonya was listening as hard as she could.

“Well, then why...how can you say it was for the sake of robbery, if you didn't take anything?” she said quickly, grasping at a straw.

“I don't know... I haven't decided yet—whether to take the money or not,” he spoke pensively, and all at once, as if recollecting himself, he grinned quickly and briefly. “Ah, what a stupid thing to come out with, eh?”

The thought flashed through Sonya: “Can he be mad?” But she abandoned it at once: no, there was something else here. She understood nothing here, nothing at all.

“You know, Sonya,” he said suddenly, with a sort of inspiration, “you know, I can tell you this much: if I'd killed them only because I was hungry,” he went on, stressing each word, and looking at her mysteriously but sincerely, “I would now be...happy! You should know that!