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Chapter 3

Gold Mines

T

HIS was the visit of Mitya of which Grushenka had

spoken to Rakitin with such horror. She was just then

expecting the ‘message,’ and was much relieved that Mitya

had not been to see her that day or the day before. She hoped

that ‘please God he won’t come till I’m gone away,’ and he

suddenly burst in on her. The rest we know already. To get

him off her hands she suggested at once that he should walk

with her to Samsonov’s, where she said she absolutely must

go ‘to settle his accounts,’ and when Mitya accompanied her

at once, she said good-bye to him at the gate, making him

promise to come at twelve o’clock to take her home again.

Mitya, too, was delighted at this arrangement. If she was

sitting at Samsonov’s she could not be going to Fyodor Pav-

lovitch’s, ‘if only she’s not lying,’ he added at once. But he

thought she was not lying from what he saw.

He was that sort of jealous man who, in the absence of

the beloved woman, at once invents all sorts of awful fan-

cies of what may be happening to her, and how she may be

betraying him, but, when shaken, heartbroken, convinced

of her faithlessness, he runs back to her, at the first glance