“Gentlemen, allow me,” cried Mitya suddenly, “allow me to say one word to Agrafena Alexandrovna, in your presence.”
“You can speak,” Nikolay Parfenovitch assented.
“Agrafena Alexandrovna!” Mitya got up from his chair, “have faith in God and in me. I am not guilty of my father’s murder!”
Having uttered these words Mitya sat down again on his chair. Grushenka stood up and crossed herself devoutly before the icon. “Thanks be to Thee, O Lord,” she said, in a voice thrilled with emotion, and still standing, she turned to Nikolay Parfenovitch and added:
“As he has spoken now, believe it! I know him. He’ll say anything as a joke or from obstinacy, but he’ll never deceive you against his conscience. He’s telling the whole truth, you may believe it.”
“Thanks, Agrafena Alexandrovna, you’ve given me fresh courage,” Mitya responded in a quivering voice.
As to the money spent the previous day, she declared that she did not know what sum it was, but had heard him tell several people that he had three thousand with him. And to the question where he got the money, she said that he had told her that he had “stolen” it from Katerina Ivanovna, and that she had replied to that that he hadn’t stolen it, and that he must pay the money back next day. On the prosecutor’s asking her emphatically whether the money he said he had stolen from Katerina Ivanovna was what he had spent yesterday, or what he had squandered here a month ago, she declared that he meant the money spent a month ago, and that that was how she understood him.
Grushenka was at last released, and Nikolay Parfenovitch informed her impulsively that she might at once return to the town and that if he could be of any assistance to her, with horses for example, or if she would care for an escort, he … would be—