The Brothers Karamazov

 The Brothers Karamazov

had snatched up a pestle from the mortar, and that when he
returned, the pestle was not with him and his hands were
smeared with blood.
‘And the blood was simply flowing, dripping from him,
dripping!’ Fenya kept exclaiming. This horrible detail was
simply the product of her disordered imagination. But al-
though not ‘dripping,’ Pyotr Ilyitch had himself seen those
hands stained with blood, and had helped to wash them.
Moreover, the question he had to decide was, not how soon
the blood had dried, but where Dmitri Fyodorovitch had
run with the pestle, or rather, whether it really was to Fy-
odor Pavlovitch’s, and how he could satisfactorily ascertain.
Pyotr Ilyitch persisted in returning to this point, and though
he found out nothing conclusive, yet he carried away a con-
viction that Dmitri Fyodorovitch could have gone nowhere
but to his father’s house, and that, therefore, something
must have happened there.
‘And when he came back,’ Fenya added with excitement.
‘I told him the whole story, and then I began asking him,
‘Why have you got blood on your hands, Dmitri Fyodoro-
vitch?’ and he answered that that was human blood, and
that he had just killed someone. He confessed it all to me,
and suddenly ran off like a madman. I sat down and began
thinking, where’s he run off to now like a madman? He’ll
go to Mokroe, I thought, and kill my mistress there. I ran
out to beg him not to kill her. I was running to his lodgings,
but I looked at Plotnikov’s shop, and saw him just setting
off, and there was no blood on his hands then.’ (Fenya had
noticed this and remembered it.) Fenya’s old grandmoth-