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that lay concealed in his pure young heart for everyone and
everything had, for the past year, been concentrated — and
perhaps wrongly so — on one being, his beloved elder. It
is true that being had for so long been accepted by him as
his ideal, that all his young strength and energy could not
but turn towards that ideal, even to the forgetting at the
moment ‘of everyone and everything.’ He remembered af-
terwards how, on that terrible day, he had entirely forgotten
his brother Dmitri, about whom he had been so anxious
and troubled the day before; he had forgotten, too, to take
the two hundred roubles to Ilusha’s father, though he had so
warmly intended to do so the preceding evening. But again
it was not miracles he needed but only ‘the higher justice’
which had been in his belief outraged by the blow that had
so suddenly and cruelly wounded his heart. And what does
it signify that this ‘justice’ looked for by Alyosha inevitably
took the shape of miracles to be wrought immediately by
the ashes of his adored teacher? Why, everyone in the mon-
astery cherished the same thought and the same hope, even
those whose intellects Alyosha revered, Father Paissy him-
self, for instance. And so Alyosha, untroubled by doubts,
clothed his dreams too in the same form as all the rest. And
a whole year of life in the monastery had formed the habit
of this expectation in his heart. But it was justice, justice, he
thirsted for, not simply miracles.
And now the man who should, he believed, have been ex-
alted above everyone in the whole world, that man, instead
of receiving the glory that was his due, was suddenly de-
graded and dishonoured! What for? Who had judged him?