Hearing of the message, Mitya suddenly smiled, and there was a flush of color on his pale cheeks. At the same moment Fenya said to him, not a bit afraid now to be inquisitive:
“Look at your hands, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. They’re all over blood!”
“Yes,” answered Mitya mechanically. He looked carelessly at his hands and at once forgot them and Fenya’s question.
He sank into silence again. Twenty minutes had passed since he had run in. His first horror was over, but evidently some new fixed determination had taken possession of him. He suddenly stood up, smiling dreamily.
“What has happened to you, sir?” said Fenya, pointing to his hands again. She spoke compassionately, as though she felt very near to him now in his grief. Mitya looked at his hands again.
“That’s blood, Fenya,” he said, looking at her with a strange expression. “That’s human blood, and my God! why was it shed? But … Fenya … there’s a fence here” (he looked at her as though setting her a riddle), “a high fence, and terrible to look at. But at dawn tomorrow, when the sun rises, Mitya will leap over that fence. … You don’t understand what fence, Fenya, and, never mind. … You’ll hear tomorrow and understand … and now, goodbye. I won’t stand in her way. I’ll step aside, I know how to step aside. Live, my joy. … You loved me for an hour, remember Mityenka Karamazov so forever. … She always used to call me Mityenka, do you remember?”
And with those words he went suddenly out of the kitchen. Fenya was almost more frightened at this sudden departure than she had been when he ran in and attacked her.