sha was ill, then touched her forehead with her lips as if to feel whether she was feverish, and finally kissed her.
“You are cold. You are trembling all over. You'd better lie down,” said the countess.
“Lie down? All right, I will. I'll lie down at once,” said Natásha.
When Natásha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was seriously wounded and was traveling with their party, she had at first asked many questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it serious? And could she see him? But after she had been told that she could not see him, that he was seriously wounded but that his life was not in danger, she ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, evidently disbelieving what they told her, and convinced that say what she might she would still be told the same. All the way she had sat motionless in a corner of the coach with wide-open eyes, and the expression in them which the countess knew so well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same way on the bench where she had seated herself on arriving. She was planning something and either deciding or had already decided something in her mind. The countess knew this, but what it might be she did not know, and this alarmed and tormented her.
“Natásha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed.”
A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame Schoss and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.
“No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor,” Natásha replied irritably and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open window the moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She put her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window frame. Natásha knew it was not Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince Andrew was in the same yard as themselves and in a part of the but across the passage; but this dreadful incessant moaning made her sob. The countess exchanged a look with Sónya.
“Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet,” said the countess, softly touching Natásha's shoulders. “Come, lie down.”
“Oh, yes. . . I'll lie down at once,” said Natásha, and began hurriedly undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.
When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, she sat down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made up on the floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front, and began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers rapidly unplaited, replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved from side to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before her. When her toilet for the night was finished she sank gently onto the sheet spread over the hay on the side nearest the door.
“Natásha, you'd better lie in the middle,” said Sónya.
“I'll stay here,” muttered Natásha. “Do lie down,” she added crossly, and buried her face in the pillow.
The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sónya undressed hastily and lay down. The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in the room. But in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little Mytíshchi a mile and a half away, and through the night came the noise of people shouting at a tavern Mamónov's Cossacks had set up across the street, and the adjutant's unceasing moans could still be heard.
For a long time Natásha listened attentively to the sounds that reached her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First she heard her mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed under her, then Madame Schoss' familiar whistling snore and Sónya's gentle breathing. Then the countess called to Natásha. Natásha did not answer.
“I think she's asleep, Mamma,” said Sónya softly.
After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one replied.
Soon after that Natásha heard her mother's even breathing. Natásha did not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt, was growing cold on the bare floor.
As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a crack in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near by. The shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of the adjutant was heard. Natásha sat up.
“Sónya, are you asleep? Mamma?” she whispered.
No one replied. Natásha rose slowly and carefully, crossed herself, and stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her slim, supple, bare feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door
