“I have only seen her once,” Alyosha protested with the same perplexity.
“Oh, she is such a lofty, incomparable creature! If only for her suffering. … Think what she has gone through, what she is enduring now! Think what awaits her! It’s all terrible, terrible!”
“Very well, I will come,” Alyosha decided, after rapidly scanning the brief, enigmatic note, which consisted of an urgent entreaty that he would come, without any sort of explanation.
“Oh, how sweet and generous that would be of you!” cried Lise with sudden animation. “I told mamma you’d be sure not to go. I said you were saving your soul. How splendid you are! I’ve always thought you were splendid. How glad I am to tell you so!”
“Lise!” said her mother impressively, though she smiled after she had said it.
“You have quite forgotten us, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said; “you never come to see us. Yet Lise has told me twice that she is never happy except with you.”
Alyosha raised his downcast eyes and again flushed, and again smiled without knowing why. But the elder was no longer watching him. He had begun talking to a monk who, as mentioned before, had been awaiting his entrance by Lise’s chair. He was evidently a monk of the humblest, that is of the peasant, class, of a narrow outlook, but a true believer, and, in his own way, a stubborn one. He announced that he had come from the far north, from Obdorsk, from Saint Sylvester, and was a member of a poor monastery, consisting of only ten monks. The elder gave him his blessing and invited him to come to his cell whenever he liked.