“I knew,” said his sister, “that you did not mean to. Oh, you know!” and the tears came to her eyes, and she touched his hand. The sentence was not clear, but he understood it perfectly, and was touched by what it expressed. Her words meant that, besides the love for her husband which held her in its sway, she prized and considered important the love she had for him, her brother, and that every misunderstanding between them caused her deep suffering.
“Thank you, thank you. Oh! what I have seen to-day!” he said, suddenly recalling the second of the dead convicts. “Two prisoners have been done to death.”
“Done to death? How?”
“Yes, done to death. They led them in this heat, and two died of sunstroke.”
“Impossible! What, to-day? just now?”
“Yes, just now. I have seen their bodies.”
“But why done to death? Who killed them?” asked Nathalie.
“They who forced them to go killed them,” said Nekhludoff, with irritation, feeling that she looked at this, too, with her husband’s eyes.
“Oh, Lord!” said Agraphena Petrovna, who had come up to them.
“Yes, we have not the slightest idea of what is being done to these unfortunate beings. But it ought to be known,” added Nekhludoff, and looked at old Korchagin, who sat with a napkin tied round him and a bottle before him, and who looked round at Nekhludoff.