She stole a glance at him.
"You are not looking in the right place.... It's in the fourth gospel," she whispered sternly, without looking at him.
"Find it and read it to me," he said. He sat down with his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand and looked away sullenly, prepared to listen.
"In three weeks' time they'll welcome me in the madhouse!
I shall be there if I am not in a worse place," he muttered to himself.
Sonia heard Raskolnikov's request distrustfully and moved hesitatingly to the table.
She took the book however.
"Haven't you read it?" she asked, looking up at him across the table.
Her voice became sterner and sterner.
"Long ago....
When I was at school.
Read!"
"And haven't you heard it in church?"
"I... haven't been.
Do you often go?"
"N-no," whispered Sonia.
Raskolnikov smiled.
"I understand....
And you won't go to your father's funeral to-morrow?"
"Yes, I shall.
I was at church last week, too... I had a requiem service."
"For whom?"
"For Lizaveta.
She was killed with an axe."
His nerves were more and more strained.
His head began to go round.
"Were you friends with Lizaveta?"
"Yes....
She was good... she used to come... not often... she couldn't....
We used to read together and... talk.
She will see God."
The last phrase sounded strange in his ears. And here was something new again: the mysterious meetings with Lizaveta and both of them--religious maniacs.
"I shall be a religious maniac myself soon! It's infectious!"
"Read!" he cried irritably and insistently.
Sonia still hesitated.
Her heart was throbbing.
She hardly dared to read to him.
He looked almost with exasperation at the "unhappy lunatic."
"What for?
You don't believe?..." she whispered softly and as it were breathlessly.
"Read!
I want you to," he persisted. "You used to read to Lizaveta."
Sonia opened the book and found the place.
Her hands were shaking, her voice failed her.
Twice she tried to begin and could not bring out the first syllable.
"Now a certain man was sick named Lazarus of Bethany..." she forced herself at last to read, but at the third word her voice broke like an overstrained string.
There was a catch in her breath.
Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on her doing so.
He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her _own_.
He understood that these feelings really were her _secret treasure_, which she had kept perhaps for years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and a distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches.