and
flew into indescribable agitation, not seeing him beside her. The woman
who had been hired by Anna Prohorovna, and was there for the night,
could not succeed in calming her, and as soon as it was daylight ran
to fetch Arina Prohorovna herself, assuring the invalid that the latter
knew where her husband was, and when he would be back. Meantime Arina
Prohorovna was in some anxiety too; she had already heard from her
husband of the deed perpetrated that night at Skvoreshniki. He had
returned home about eleven o'clock in a terrible state of mind and
body; wringing his hands, he flung himself face downwards on his bed and
shaking with convulsive sobs kept repeating, "It's not right, it's not
right, it's not right at all!" He ended, of course, by confessing it all
to Arina Prohorovna--but to no one else in the house. She left him on
his bed, sternly impressing upon him that "if he must blubber he must do
it in his pillow so as not to be overheard, and that he would be a fool
if he showed any traces of it next day." She felt somewhat anxious,
however, and began at once to clear things up in case of emergency;
she succeeded in hiding or completely destroying all suspicious papers,
books, manifestoes perhaps. At the same time she reflected that she, her
sister, her aunt, her sister-in-law the student, and perhaps even her
long-eared brother had really nothing much to be afraid of. When the
nurse ran to her in the morning she went without a second thought to
Marya Ignatyevna's. She was desperately anxious, moreover, to find out
whether what her husband had told her that night in a terrified and
frantic whisper, that was almost like delirium, was true--that is,
whether Pyotr Stepanovitch had been right in his reckoning that Kirillov
would sacrifice himself for the general benefit.

But she arrived at Marya Ignatyevna's too late: when the latter had sent
off the woman and was left alone, she was unable to bear the suspense;
she got out of bed, and throwing round her the first garment she could
find, something very light and unsuitable for the weather, I believe,
she ran down to Kirillov's lodge herself, thinking that he perhaps would
be better able than anyone to tell her something about her husband. The
terrible effect on her of what she saw there may well be imagined. It
is remarkable that she did not read Kirillov's last letter, which lay
conspicuously on the table, overlooking it, of course, in her fright.
She ran back to h