What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! Mummy! such a thing never happened to me before," she said, surprised and alarmed at the feeling she was aware of in herself.

" And could we ever have thought!..." It seemed to Natasha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew at Otradnoe she had fallen in love with him.

It was as if she feared this strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had then chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding him, as it seemed, not indifferent to her.