given; but
he is good and magnanimous and will love her who makes his son happy."
Princess Mary went on to ask Natasha to fix a time when she could see
her again.

After reading the letter Natasha sat down at the writing table to answer
it. "Dear Princess," she wrote in French quickly and mechanically, and
then paused. What more could she write after all that had happened
the evening before? "Yes, yes! All that has happened, and now all is
changed," she thought as she sat with the letter she had begun before
her. "Must I break off with him? Must I really? That's awful..." and to
escape from these dreadful thoughts she went to Sonya and began sorting
patterns with her.

After dinner Natasha went to her room and again took up Princess Mary's
letter. "Can it be that it is all over?" she thought. "Can it be
that all this has happened so quickly and has destroyed all that went
before?" She recalled her love for Prince Andrew in all its former
strength, and at the same time felt that she loved Kuragin. She vividly
pictured herself as Prince Andrew's wife, and the scenes of happiness
with him she had so often repeated in her imagination, and at the
same time, aglow with excitement, recalled every detail of yesterday's
interview with Anatole.

"Why could that not be as well?" she sometimes asked herself in complete
bewilderment. "Only so could I be completely happy; but now I have to
choose, and I can't be happy without either of them. Only," she thought,
"to tell Prince Andrew what has happened or to hide it from him are
both equally impossible. But with that one nothing is spoiled. But am
I really to abandon forever the joy of Prince Andrew's love, in which I
have lived so long?"

"Please, Miss!" whispered a maid entering the room with a mysterious
air. "A man told me to give you this-" and she handed Natasha a letter.

"Only, for Christ's sake..." the girl went on, as Natasha, without
thinking, mechanically broke the seal and read a love letter from
Anatole, of which, without taking in a word, she understood only that
it was a letter from him--from the man she loved. Yes, she loved him, or
else how could that have happened which had happened? And how could she
have a love letter from him in her hand?

With trembling hands Natasha held that passionate love letter which
Dolokhov had composed for Anatole, and as she read it she found in it an
echo of all that she herself imagined she was feeling.

"Since yesterday even