A look of firmness and intelligent purpose had developed in her face.
There were signs of a spiritual transformation in her, and a steadfast, fine and humble determination that nothing could shake could be discerned in her.
There was a small vertical line between her brows which gave her charming face a look of concentrated thought, almost austere at the first glance.
There was scarcely a trace of her former frivolity.
It seemed strange to Alyosha, too, that in spite of the calamity that had overtaken the poor girl, betrothed to a man who had been arrested for a terrible crime, almost at the instant of their betrothal, in spite of her illness and the almost inevitable sentence hanging over Mitya, Grushenka had not yet lost her youthful cheerfulness.
There was a soft light in the once proud eyes, though at times they gleamed with the old vindictive fire when she was visited by one disturbing thought stronger than ever in her heart.
The object of that uneasiness was the same as ever- Katerina Ivanovna, of whom Grushenka had even raved when she lay in delirium.
Alyosha knew that she was fearfully jealous of her. Yet Katerina Ivanovna had not once visited Mitya in his prison, though she might have done it whenever she liked.
All this made a difficult problem for Alyosha, for he was the only person to whom Grushenka opened her heart and from whom she was continually asking advice. Sometimes he was unable to say anything.
Full of anxiety he entered her lodging.
She was at home. She had returned from seeing Mitya half an hour before, and from the rapid movement with which she leapt up from her chair to meet him he saw that she had been expecting him with great impatience.
A pack of cards dealt for a game of "fools" lay on the table.
A bed had been made up on the leather sofa on the other side and Maximov lay, half reclining, on it. He wore a dressing-gown and a cotton nightcap, and was evidently ill and weak, though he was smiling blissfully.
When the homeless old man returned with Grushenka from Mokroe two months before, he had simply stayed on and was still staying with her.
He arrived with her in rain and sleet, sat down on the sofa, drenched and scared, and gazed mutely at her with a timid, appealing smile.
Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and in the first stage of fever, almost forgot his existence in all she had to do the first half hour after her arrival. Suddenly she chanced to look at him intently: he laughed a pitiful, helpless little laugh.
She called Fenya and told her to give him something to eat.
All that day he sat in the same place, almost without stirring. When it got dark and the shutters were closed, Fenya asked her mistress:
"Is the gentleman going to stay the night, mistress?"
"Yes; make him a bed on the sofa," answered Grushenka.
Questioning him more in detail, Grushenka learned from him that he had literally nowhere to go, and that "Mr. Kalganov, my benefactor, told me straight that he wouldn't receive me again and gave me five roubles."
"Well, God bless you, you'd better stay, then," Grushenka decided in her grief, smiling compassionately at him.
Her smile wrung the old man's heart and his lips twitched with grateful tears.
And so the destitute wanderer had stayed with her ever since.
He did not leave the house even when she was ill.
Fenya and her grandmother, the cook, did not turn him out, but went on serving him meals and making up his bed on the sofa.
Grushenka had grown used to him, and coming back from seeing Mitya (whom she had begun to visit in prison before she was really well) she would sit down and begin talking to
"Maximushka" about trifling matters, 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 little 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 warder; if you don't eat them before evening, it will be that your venomous spite is enough for you!' With that I went away.
We quarrelled again, would you believe it?
Whenever I go we quarrel."
Grushenka said all this in one breath in her agitation.
Maximov, feeling nervous, at once smiled and looked on the floor.
"What did you quarrel about this time?" asked Alyosha.