to aid them.

"And you all listen to me!" said Rostov to the peasants. "Be off to your
houses at once, and don't let one of your voices be heard!"

"Why, we've not done any harm! We did it just out of foolishness. It's
all nonsense... I said then that it was not in order," voices were heard
bickering with one another.

"There! What did I say?" said Alpatych, coming into his own again. "It's
wrong, lads!"

"All our stupidity, Yakov Alpatych," came the answers, and the
crowd began at once to disperse through the village.

The two bound men were led off to the master's house. The two drunken
peasants followed them.

"Aye, when I look at you!..." said one of them to Karp.

"How can one talk to the masters like that? What were you thinking of,
you fool?" added the other--"A real fool!"

Two hours later the carts were standing in the courtyard of the
Bogucharovo house. The peasants were briskly carrying out the
proprietor's goods and packing them on the carts, and Dron, liberated at
Princess Mary's wish from the cupboard where he had been confined, was
standing in the yard directing the men.

"Don't put it in so carelessly," said one of the peasants, a man with a
round smiling face, taking a casket from a housemaid. "You know it has
cost money! How can you chuck it in like that or shove it under the cord
where it'll get rubbed? I don't like that way of doing things. Let it
all be done properly, according to rule. Look here, put it under the
bast matting and cover it with hay--that's the way!"

"Eh, books, books!" said another peasant, bringing out Prince Andrew's
library cupboards. "Don't catch up against it! It's heavy, lads--solid
books."

"Yes, they worked all day and didn't play!" remarked the tall,
round-faced peasant gravely, pointing with a significant wink at the
dictionaries that were on the top.

Unwilling to obtrude himself on the princess, Rostov did not go back to
the house but remained in the village awaiting her departure. When her
carriage drove out of the house, he mounted and accompanied her eight
miles from Bogucharovo to where the road was occupied by our troops. At
the inn at Yankovo he respectfully took leave of her, for the first time
permitting himself to kiss her hand.

"How can you speak so!" he blushingly replied to Princess Mary's
expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had
occurred. "Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had
only peasan