“Oh, don’t take her name in vain! I’m a scoundrel to bring her into it. Yes, I’ve seen that she hated me … a long while. … From the very first, even that evening at my lodging … but enough, enough. You’re unworthy even to know of that. No need of that at all. … I need only tell you that she sent for me a month ago, gave me three thousand roubles to send off to her sister and another relation in Moscow (as though she couldn’t have sent it off herself!) and I … it was just at that fatal moment in my life when I … well, in fact, when I’d just come to love another, her, she’s sitting down below now, Grushenka. I carried her off here to Mokroe then, and wasted here in two days half that damned three thousand, but the other half I kept on me. Well, I’ve kept that other half, that fifteen hundred, like a locket round my neck, but yesterday I undid it, and spent it. What’s left of it, eight hundred roubles, is in your hands now, Nikolay Parfenovitch. That’s the change out of the fifteen hundred I had yesterday.”
“Excuse me. How’s that? Why, when you were here a month ago you spent three thousand, not fifteen hundred, everybody knows that.”
“Who knows it? Who counted the money? Did I let anyone count it?”
“Why, you told everyone yourself that you’d spent exactly three thousand.”
“It’s true, I did. I told the whole town so, and the whole town said so. And here, at Mokroe, too, everyone reckoned it was three thousand. Yet I didn’t spend three thousand, but fifteen hundred. And the other fifteen hundred I sewed into a little bag. That’s how it was, gentlemen. That’s where I got that money yesterday. …”
“This is almost miraculous,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch.
“Allow me to inquire,” observed the prosecutor at last, “have you informed anyone whatever of this circumstance before, I mean that you had fifteen hundred left about you a month ago?”