Omnipresent, Omniscient God entered with a sweet influence into her very soul, filling her with a pure and reverend dread, and Christ seemed to her to be close to her, and to be a friend, almost, as it were, a relation. It was Agafia, also, who taught her to pray. Sometimes she awoke Liza at the early dawn, dressed her hastily, and secretly conveyed her to matins. Liza would follow her on tiptoe, scarcely venturing to breathe. The cold, dim morning light, the raw air pervading the almost empty church, the very secrecy of those unexpected excursions, the cautious return home to bed--all that combination of the forbidden, the strange, the holy, thrilled the young girl, penetrated to the inmost depths of her being. Agafia never blamed any one, and she never scolded Liza for any childish faults. When she was dissatisfied about anything, she merely kept silence, and Liza always understood that silence. With a child's quick instinct, she also knew well when Agafia was dissatisfied with others, whether it were with Maria Dmitrievna or with Kalitine himself. For rather more than three years Agafia waited upon Liza. She was replaced by Mademoiselle Moreau; but the frivolous Frenchwoman, with her dry manner and her constant exclamation, _Tout ça c'est des bêtises_! could not expel from Liza's heart the recollection of her much-loved nurse. The seeds that had been sown had pushed their roots too far for that. After that Agafia, although she had ceased to attend Liza, remained for some time longer in the house, and often saw her pupil, and treated her as she had been used to do. But when Marfa Timofeevna entered the Kalitines' house, Agafia did not get on well with her. The austere earnestness of the former "wearer of the coarse petticoat." [Footnote: The _Panovnitsa_, or wearer of the _Panovna_, a sort of petticoat made of a coarse stuff of motley hue.] did not please the impatient and self-willed old lady. Agafia obtained leave to go on a pilgrimage, and she never came back. Vague rumors asserted that she had retired into a schismatic convent. But the impression left by her on Liza's heart did not disappear. Just as before, the girl went to mass, as if she were going to a festival; and when in church prayed with enthusiasm, with a kind of restrained and timid rapture, at which her mother secretly wondered not a little. Even Marfa Timofeevna, although she never put any constraint upon Liza, tried to induce her to moderate her zeal, and would not let her make so many prostrations. It was not a lady-like habit, she said.