ts to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far,"
said he with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. "I
am only happy to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance.
Good-by, Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to meet
you again in happier circumstances. If you don't want to make me blush,
please don't thank me!"

But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked
him with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude and
tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to thank him
for. On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he not been
there she would have perished at the hands of the mutineers and of the
French, and that he had exposed himself to terrible and obvious danger
to save her, and even more certain was it that he was a man of lofty and
noble soul, able to understand her position and her sorrow. His kind,
honest eyes, with the tears rising in them when she herself had begun to
cry as she spoke of her loss, did not leave her memory.

When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt
her eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the strange
question presented itself to her: did she love him?

On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess' position was not
a cheerful one, Dunyasha, who went with her in the carriage, more than
once noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window and smiled at
something with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow.

"Well, supposing I do love him?" thought Princess Mary.

Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen in
love with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted herself
with the thought that no one would ever know it and that she would not
be to blame if, without ever speaking of it to anyone, she continued to
the end of her life to love the man with whom she had fallen in love for
the first and last time in her life.

Sometimes when she recalled his looks, his sympathy, and his words,
happiness did not appear impossible to her. It was at those moments that
Dunyasha noticed her smiling as she looked out of the carriage window.

"Was it not fate that brought him to Bogucharovo, and at that very
moment?" thought Princess Mary. "And that caused his sister to refuse my
brother?" And in all this Princess Mary saw the hand of Providence.

The impression the princess made on Rostov was a very agr