with his sorrow, but Pierre
saw by her face that she was glad both at what had happened and at the
way her brother had taken the news of Natasha's faithlessness.

"He says he expected it," she remarked. "I know his pride will not let
him express his feelings, but still he has taken it better, far better,
than I expected. Evidently it had to be...."

"But is it possible that all is really ended?" asked Pierre.

Princess Mary looked at him with astonishment. She did not understand
how he could ask such a question. Pierre went into the study. Prince
Andrew, greatly changed and plainly in better health, but with a fresh
horizontal wrinkle between his brows, stood in civilian dress facing
his father and Prince Meshcherski, warmly disputing and vigorously
gesticulating. The conversation was about Speranski--the news of whose
sudden exile and alleged treachery had just reached Moscow.

"Now he is censured and accused by all who were enthusiastic about him
a month ago," Prince Andrew was saying, "and by those who were unable to
understand his aims. To judge a man who is in disfavor and to throw on
him all the blame of other men's mistakes is very easy, but I maintain
that if anything good has been accomplished in this reign it was done by
him, by him alone."

He paused at the sight of Pierre. His face quivered and immediately
assumed a vindictive expression.

"Posterity will do him justice," he concluded, and at once turned to
Pierre.

"Well, how are you? Still getting stouter?" he said with animation, but
the new wrinkle on his forehead deepened. "Yes, I am well," he said in
answer to Pierre's question, and smiled.

To Pierre that smile said plainly: "I am well, but my health is now of
no use to anyone."

After a few words to Pierre about the awful roads from the Polish
frontier, about people he had met in Switzerland who knew Pierre, and
about M. Dessalles, whom he had brought from abroad to be his son's
tutor, Prince Andrew again joined warmly in the conversation about
Speranski which was still going on between the two old men.

"If there were treason, or proofs of secret relations with Napoleon,
they would have been made public," he said with warmth and haste. "I do
not, and never did, like Speranski personally, but I like justice!"

Pierre now recognized in his friend a need with which he was only too
familiar, to get excited and to have arguments about extraneous matters
in order to stifle thoughts that were