acknowledge this feeling in herself, yet
there it was. And what seemed still more terrible to her was that since
her father's illness began (perhaps even sooner, when she stayed with
him expecting something to happen), all the personal desires and hopes
that had been forgotten or sleeping within her had awakened. Thoughts
that had not entered her mind for years--thoughts of a life free from
the fear of her father, and even the possibility of love and of family
happiness--floated continually in her imagination like temptations
of the devil. Thrust them aside as she would, questions continually
recurred to her as to how she would order her life now, after that.
These were temptations of the devil and Princess Mary knew it. She knew
that the sole weapon against him was prayer, and she tried to pray. She
assumed an attitude of prayer, looked at the icons, repeated the words
of a prayer, but she could not pray. She felt that a different world had
now taken possession of her--the life of a world of strenuous and free
activity, quite opposed to the spiritual world in which till now she
had been confined and in which her greatest comfort had been prayer.
She could not pray, could not weep, and worldly cares took possession of
her.

It was becoming dangerous to remain in Bogucharovo. News of the approach
of the French came from all sides, and in one village, ten miles from
Bogucharovo, a homestead had been looted by French marauders.

The doctor insisted on the necessity of moving the prince; the
provincial Marshal of the Nobility sent an official to Princess Mary
to persuade her to get away as quickly as possible, and the head of the
rural police having come to Bogucharovo urged the same thing, saying
that the French were only some twenty-five miles away, that French
proclamations were circulating in the villages, and that if the princess
did not take her father away before the fifteenth, he could not answer
for the consequences.

The princess decided to leave on the fifteenth. The cares of preparation
and giving orders, for which everyone came to her, occupied her all day.
She spent the night of the fourteenth as usual, without undressing, in
the room next to the one where the prince lay. Several times, waking up,
she heard his groans and muttering, the creak of his bed, and the steps
of Tikhon and the doctor when they turned him over. Several times she
listened at the door, and it seemed to her that his mutterings were
lo