them. Natasha laughed at every word he said and at every word she said, not because what they said was amusing, but because she was in high spirits and unable to contain her joy, which brimmed over in laughter.

“Ah, isn’t it nice, isn’t it splendid!” she kept saying every moment. Under the influence of the warm sunshine of love, Rostov felt that for the first time for a year and a half his soul and his face were expanding in that childish smile, he had not once smiled since he left home.

“No, I say,” she said, “you’re quite a man now, eh? I’m awfully glad you’re my brother.” She touched his moustache. “I do want to know what sort of creatures you men are. Just like us? No.”

“Why did Sonya run away?” asked Rostov.

“Oh, there’s a lot to say about that! How are you going to speak to Sonya? Shall you call her ‘thou’ or ‘you’?”

“As it happens,” said Rostov.

“Call her ‘you,’ please; I’ll tell you why afterwards.”

“But why?”

“Well, I’ll tell you now. You know that Sonya’s my friend, such a friend that I burnt my arm for her sake. Here, look.” She pulled up her muslin sleeve and showed him on her long, thin, soft arm above the elbow near the shoulder (on the part which is covered even in a ball-dress) a red mark.

“I burnt that to show her my love. I simply heated a ruler in the fire and pressed it on it.”

Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms, and looking into Natasha’s wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for any one else but gave him some of the greatest pleasures in his life. And burning one’s arm with a ruler as a proof of love did not strike him as pointless; he understood it, and was not surprised at it.

“Well, is that all?” he asked.

“Well, we are such friends, such great friends! That’s nonsense—the ruler; but we are friends for ever. If she once loves any one, it’s for ever; I don’t understand that, I forget so quickly.”

“Well, what then?”

“Yes, so she loves me and you.” Natasha suddenly flushed. “Well, you remember before you went away … She says you are to forget it all… She said, I shall always love him, but let him be free. That really is splendid, noble! Yes, yes; very noble? Yes?” Natasha asked with such seriousness and emotion that it was clear that what she was saying now she had talked of before with tears. Rostov thought a little.

“I never take back my word,” he said. “And besides, Sonya’s so charming that who would be such a fool as to renounce his own happiness?”

“No, no,” cried Natasha. “She and I have talked about that already. We knew that you’d say that. But that won’t do, because, don’t you see, if you say that—if you consider yourself bound by your word, then it makes it as though she had said that on purpose. It makes it as though you were, after all, obliged to marry her, and it makes it all wrong.”

Rostov saw that it had all been well thought over by them. On the previous day, Sonya had struck him by her beauty; in the glimpse he had caught of her to-day, she seemed even prettier. She was a charming girl of sixteen, obviously passionately in love with him (of that he could not doubt for an instant). “Why