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to visit in prison before she was really well) she would sit
down and begin talking to ‘Maximushka’ about trifling mat-
ters, to keep her from thinking of her sorrow. The old man
turned out to be a good story-teller on occasions, so that
at last he became necessary to her. Grushenka saw scarcely
anyone else beside Alyosha, who did not come every day
and never stayed long. Her old merchant lay seriously ill
at this time, ‘at his last gasp’ as they said in the town, and
he did, in fact, die a week after Mitya’s trial. Three weeks
before his death, feeling the end approaching, he made his
sons, their wives and children, come upstairs to him at last
and bade them not leave him again. From that moment he
gave strict orders to his servants not to admit Grushenka
and to tell her if she came, ‘The master wishes you long life
and happiness and tells you to forget him.’ But Grushenka
sent almost every day to inquire after him.
‘You’ve come at last!’ she cried, flinging down the cards
and joyfully greeting Alyosha, ‘and Maximushka’s been
scaring me that perhaps you wouldn’t come. Ah, how I need
you! Sit down to the table. What will you have coffee?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Alyosha, sitting down at the table. ‘I am
very hungry.’
‘That’s right. Fenya, Fenya, coffee,’ cried Grushenka. ‘It’s
been made a long time ready for you. And bring some lit-
tle pies, and mind they are hot. Do you know, we’ve had a
storm over those pies to-day. I took them to the prison for
him, and would you believe it, he threw them back to me: he
would not eat them. He flung one of them on the floor and
stamped on it. So I said to him: ‘I shall leave them with the