with
Alpatych, conferred with Dessalles about her nephew, and gave orders and
made preparations for the journey to Moscow.

Natasha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making
preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.

Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natasha go with her to Moscow,
and both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw their daughter
losing strength every day and thought that a change of scene and the
advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her.

"I am not going anywhere," Natasha replied when this was proposed to
her. "Do please just leave me alone!" And she ran out of the room, with
difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation rather than
of sorrow.

After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her grief,
Natasha spent most of the time in her room by herself, sitting huddled
up feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and twisting
something with her slender nervous fingers and gazing intently and
fixedly at whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This solitude exhausted
and tormented her but she was in absolute need of it. As soon as anyone
entered she got up quickly, changed her position and expression, and
picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting impatiently for the
intruder to go.

She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that
on which--with a terrible questioning too great for her strength--her
spiritual gaze was fixed.

One day toward the end of December Natasha, pale and thin, dressed in a
black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a knot, was
crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously crumpling and
smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at a corner of the
door.

She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone--to the other side
of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never before
thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and improbable,
was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible than this side of
life, where everything was either emptiness and desolation or suffering
and indignity.

She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine him
otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he had been
at Mytishchi, at Troitsa, and at Yaroslavl.

She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, and
sometimes devised other words they might have spo