“Ah, my God! Thank God!” said the Princess Marya. “I must go and meet him; he does not know Russian.”

Princess Marya flung on a shawl and ran to meet the stranger. As she passed through the ante-room, she saw through the window a carriage and lanterns standing at the entrance. She went out on to the stairs. At the post of the balustrade stood a tallow-candle guttering in the draught. The footman Filipp, looking scared, stood below on the first landing of the staircase, with another candle in his hand. Still lower down, at the turn of the winding stairs, steps in thick overshoes could be heard coming up. And a voice—familiar it seemed to Princess Marya—was saying something.

“Thank God!” said the voice. “And father?”

“He has gone to bed,” answered the voice of the butler, Demyan, who was below.

Then the voice said something more, Demyan answered something, and the steps in thick overshoes began approaching more rapidly up the unseen part of the staircase.

“It is Andrey!” thought Princess Marya. “No, it cannot be, it would be too extraordinary,” she thought; and at the very instant she was thinking so, on the landing where the footman stood with a candle, there came into sight the face and figure of Prince Andrey, in a fur coat, with a deep collar covered with snow. Yes, it was he, but pale and thin, and with a transformed, strangely softened, agitated expression on his face. He went up the stairs and embraced his sister.

“You did not get my letter, then?” he asked; and not waiting for an answer, which he would not have received, for the princess could not speak, he turned back, and with the doctor who was behind him (they had met at the last station), he ran again rapidly upstairs and again embraced his sister.

“What a strange fate!” he said, “Masha, darling!” And flinging off his fur coat and overboots, he went towards the little princess’s room.