“Ah, is that you, mon cousin?”

“Ah, is that you, mon cousin?”

She got up and smoothed her hair, which was always, even now, so extraordinarily smooth that it seemed as though made out of one piece with her head and covered with varnish.

“Has anything happened?” she asked. “I am in continual dread.”

“Nothing, everything is unchanged. I have only come to have a little talk with you, Katish, about business,” said the prince, sitting down wearily in the low chair from which she had just risen. “How warm it is here, though,” he said. “Come, sit here; let us talk.”

“I wondered whether anything had happened,” said the princess, and with her stonily severe expression unchanged, she sat down opposite the prince, preparing herself to listen. “I have been trying to get some sleep, mon cousin, but I can’t.”

“Well, my dear?” said Prince Vassily, taking the princess’s hand, and bending it downwards as his habit was.

It was plain that this “well?” referred to much that they both comprehended without mentioning it in words.

The princess, with her spare, upright figure, so disproportionately long in the body, looked straight at the prince with no sign of emotion in her prominent grey eyes. She shook her head, and sighing looked towards the holy pictures. Her gesture might have been interpreted as an expression of grief and devotion, or as an expression of weariness and the hope of a speedy release. Prince Vassily took it as an expression of weariness.

“And do you suppose it’s any easier for me?” he said. “I am as worn out as a post horse. I must have a little talk with you, Katish, and a very serious one.”

Prince Vassily paused. and his cheeks began twitching nervously, first on one side, then on the other, giving his face an unpleasant expression such as was never seen on his countenance when he was in drawing-rooms. His eyes, too, were different from usual: at one moment they stared with a sort of insolent jocoseness, at the next they looked round furtively.

The princess, pulling her dog on her lap with her thin, dry hands, gazed intently at the eyes of Prince Vassily, but it was evident that she would not break the silence, if she had to sit silent till morning.

“You see, my dear princess and cousin, Katerina Semyonovna,” pursued Prince Vassily, obviously with some inner conflict bracing himself to go on with what he wanted to say, “at such moments as the present, one has to think of everything. One must think of the future, of you … I care for all of you as if you were my own children; you know that.”

The princess looked at him with the same dull immovable gaze.

“Finally, we have to think of my family too,” continued Prince Vassily, angrily pushing away a little table and not looking at her: “you know, Katish, that you three Mamontov sisters and my wife,—we are the only direct heirs of the count. I know, I know how painful it is for you to speak and think of such things. And it’s as hard for me; but, my dear, I am a man over fifty, I must be ready for anything. Do you know that I have sent for Pierre, and that the count, pointing straight at his portrait, has asked for him?”

Prince Vassily looked inquiringly at the princess, but he could not make out whether she was considering what he had said, or was simply staring at him.