r husband irritated her. "What do I want with them? I want no one but
Petya," she thought.

At the end of August the Rostovs received another letter from Nicholas.
He wrote from the province of Voronezh where he had been sent to procure
remounts, but that letter did not set the countess at ease. Knowing that
one son was out of danger she became the more anxious about Petya.

Though by the twentieth of August nearly all the Rostovs' acquaintances
had left Moscow, and though everybody tried to persuade the countess to
get away as quickly as possible, she would not hear of leaving before
her treasure, her adored Petya, returned. On the twenty-eighth of August
he arrived. The passionate tenderness with which his mother received him
did not please the sixteen-year-old officer. Though she concealed from
him her intention of keeping him under her wing, Petya guessed her
designs, and instinctively fearing that he might give way to emotion
when with her--might "become womanish" as he termed it to himself--he
treated her coldly, avoided her, and during his stay in Moscow attached
himself exclusively to Natasha for whom he had always had a particularly
brotherly tenderness, almost lover-like.

Owing to the count's customary carelessness nothing was ready for their
departure by the twenty-eighth of August and the carts that were to
come from their Ryazan and Moscow estates to remove their household
belongings did not arrive till the thirtieth.

From the twenty-eighth till the thirty-first all Moscow was in a bustle
and commotion. Every day thousands of men wounded at Borodino were
brought in by the Dorogomilov gate and taken to various parts of Moscow,
and thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions
out by the other gates. In spite of Rostopchin's broadsheets, or because
of them or independently of them, the strangest and most contradictory
rumors were current in the town. Some said that no one was to be allowed
to leave the city, others on the contrary said that all the icons had
been taken out of the churches and everybody was to be ordered to leave.
Some said there had been another battle after Borodino at which the
French had been routed, while others on the contrary reported that the
Russian army had been destroyed. Some talked about the Moscow militia
which, preceded by the clergy, would go to the Three Hills; others
whispered that Augustin had been forbidden to leave, that traitors had
been seized, t