or not. But, strange to say, both the lawyers listened now with a sort of awful reserve, looked coldly at him, asked few questions. Mitya could gather nothing from their faces.
“They’re angry and offended,” he thought. “Well, bother them!”
When he described how he made up his mind at last to make the “signal” to his father that Grushenka had come, so that he should open the window, the lawyers paid no attention to the word “signal,” as though they entirely failed to grasp the meaning of the word in this connection: so much so, that Mitya noticed it.
Coming at last to the moment when, seeing his father peering out of the window, his hatred flared up and he pulled the pestle out of his pocket, he suddenly, as though of design, stopped short. He sat gazing at the wall and was aware that their eyes were fixed upon him.
“Well?” said the investigating lawyer. “You pulled out the weapon and … and what happened then?”
“Then? Why, then I murdered him … hit him on the head and cracked his skull. … I suppose that’s your story. That’s it!”
His eyes suddenly flashed. All his smothered wrath suddenly flamed up with extraordinary violence in his soul.
“Our story?” repeated Nikolay Parfenovitch. “Well—and yours?”
Mitya dropped his eyes and was a long time silent.
“My story, gentlemen? Well, it was like this,” he began softly. > “Whether it was someone’s tears, or my mother prayed to God, or a good angel kissed me at that instant, I don’t know. But the devil was conquered. I rushed from the window and ran to the fence. My father was alarmed and, for the first time, he saw me then, cried out,