and mysterious part of the prediction.

"But what does it mean?" she added meditatively.

"Oh, I don't know, it is all so strange," replied Sonya, clutching at
her head.

A few minutes later Prince Andrew rang and Natasha went to him, but
Sonya, feeling unusually excited and touched, remained at the window
thinking about the strangeness of what had occurred.

They had an opportunity that day to send letters to the army, and the
countess was writing to her son.

"Sonya!" said the countess, raising her eyes from her letter as her
niece passed, "Sonya, won't you write to Nicholas?" She spoke in a soft,
tremulous voice, and in the weary eyes that looked over her spectacles
Sonya read all that the countess meant to convey with these words. Those
eyes expressed entreaty, shame at having to ask, fear of a refusal, and
readiness for relentless hatred in case of such refusal.

Sonya went up to the countess and, kneeling down, kissed her hand.

"Yes, Mamma, I will write," said she.

Sonya was softened, excited, and touched by all that had occurred that
day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen of her
vision. Now that she knew that the renewal of Natasha's relations with
Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying Princess Mary, she
was joyfully conscious of a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in
which she was accustomed to live and loved to live. So with a joyful
consciousness of performing a magnanimous deed--interrupted several
times by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes--she wrote that
touching letter the arrival of which had so amazed Nicholas.

CHAPTER IX

The officer and soldiers who had arrested Pierre treated him with
hostility but yet with respect, in the guardhouse to which he was taken.
In their attitude toward him could still be felt both uncertainty as
to who he might be--perhaps a very important person--and hostility as a
result of their recent personal conflict with him.

But when the guard was relieved next morning, Pierre felt that for the
new guard--both officers and men--he was not as interesting as he had
been to his captors; and in fact the guard of the second day did not
recognize in this big, stout man in a peasant coat the vigorous person
who had fought so desperately with the marauder and the convoy and had
uttered those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only
No. 17 of the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some