But yet I fancy they felt somewhat awkward now, they did not look perfectly at their ease. Though they knew they were perfectly right about the complaint, as they were proved to be in the sequel, yet they felt rather as though they had cut themselves off from their mates, as though they had betrayed their comrades to the major. Another man who was in the kitchen was Yolkin, the Siberian peasant condemned for false coinage who had carried off Kulikov’s practice as a vet in the town. The Starodubovsky Old Believer was there too. The cooks to a man had remained in the kitchen, probably convinced that they constituted part of the prison management, and consequently that it was not seemly for them to act in opposition to it.

“Almost all have gone out except these, though,” I observed hesitatingly to M.

“What, is it true?” muttered B.