ed: "Well, what?"

"Mamma! For heaven's sake don't ask me anything now! One can't talk
about that," said Natasha.

But all the same that night Natasha, now agitated and now frightened,
lay a long time in her mother's bed gazing straight before her. She told
her how he had complimented her, how he told her he was going abroad,
asked her where they were going to spend the summer, and then how he had
asked her about Boris.

"But such a... such a... never happened to me before!" she said. "Only I
feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I'm with him. What
does that mean? Does it mean that it's the real thing? Yes? Mamma, are
you asleep?"

"No, my love; I am frightened myself," answered her mother. "Now go!"

"All the same I shan't sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! Mummy!
such a thing never happened to me before," she said, surprised and
alarmed at the feeling she was aware of in herself. "And could we ever
have thought!..."

It seemed to Natasha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew
at Otradnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she feared
this strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had
then chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding
him, as it seemed, not indifferent to her.

"And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg while
we are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that ball.
It is fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this! Already
then, directly I saw him I felt something peculiar."

"What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them..." said
her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince Andrew had
written in Natasha's album.

"Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?"

"Don't, Natasha! Pray to God. 'Marriages are made in heaven,'" said her
mother.

"Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!" cried Natasha, shedding
tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother.

At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and telling him
of his love for Natasha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.

That day Countess Helene had a reception at her house. The French
ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of
late become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies and
gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the rooms and
struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded