“Would not this interview be trying for him, chère Anna Mihalovna?” he said. “Let us wait till the evening; the doctors have predicted a crisis.”

“But waiting’s out of the question, prince, at such a moment. Think, it is a question of saving his soul. Ah! how terrible, the duties of a Christian.…”

The door from the inner rooms opened, and one of the count’s nieces entered with a cold and forbidding face, and a long waist strikingly out of proportion with the shortness of her legs.

Prince Vassily turned to her. “Well, how is he?”

“Still the same. What can you expect with this noise? …” said the princess, scanning Anna Mihalovna, as a stranger.

“Ah, dear, I did not recognise you,” said Anna Mihalovna, with a delighted smile, and she ambled lightly up to the count’s niece. “I have just come, and I am at your service to help in nursing my uncle. I imagine what you have been suffering,” she added, sympathetically turning her eyes up.

The princess made no reply, she did not even smile, but walked straight away. Anna Mihalovna took off her gloves, and entrenched herself as it were in an armchair, inviting Prince Vassily to sit down beside her.

“Boris!” she said to her son, and she smiled at him, “I am going in to the count, to poor uncle, and you can go to Pierre, mon ami, meanwhile, and don’t forget to give him the Rostovs’ invitation. They ask him to dinner. I suppose he won’t go?” she said to the prince.

“On the contrary,” said the prince, visibly cast down. “I should be very glad if you would take that young man off my hands.… He sticks on here. The count has not once asked for him.”

He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted the youth downstairs and up another staircase to the apartments of Pyotr Kirillovitch.