Nikolay, too, was much pleased by the uncle’s playing. He played the song a second time. The smiling face of Anisya Fyodorovna appeared again in the doorway and other faces behind her.… “For the water from the well, a maiden calls to him to stay!” played the uncle. He made another dexterous flourish and broke off, twitching his shoulders.

“Oh, oh, uncle darling!” wailed Natasha, in a voice as imploring as though her life depended on it. The uncle got up, and there seemed to be two men in him at that moment—one smiled seriously at the antics of the merry player, while the merry player naïvely and carefully executed the steps preliminary to the dance.

“Come, little niece!” cried the uncle, waving to Natasha the hand that had struck the last chord.

Natasha flung off the shawl that had been wrapped round her, ran forward facing the uncle, and setting her arms akimbo, made the movements of her shoulder and waist.

Where, how, when had this young countess, educated by a French émigrée, sucked in with the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? Where had she picked up these movements which the pas de châle would, one might have thought, long ago have eradicated? But the spirit, the motions were those inimitable, unteachable, Russian gestures the uncle had hoped for from her. As soon as she stood up, and smiled that triumphant, proud smile of sly gaiety, the dread that had come on Nikolay and all the spectators at the first moment, the dread that she would not dance it well, was at an end and they were already admiring her.

She danced the dance well, so well indeed, so perfectly, that Anisya Fyodorovna, who handed her at once the kerchief she needed in the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched that slender, graceful little countess, reared in silk and velvet, belonging to another world than hers, who was yet able to understand all that was in Anisya and her father and her mother and her aunt and every Russian soul.

“Well done, little countess—forward, quick march!” cried the uncle, laughing gleefully as he finished the dance. “Ah, that’s a niece to be proud of! She only wants a fine fellow picked out now for her husband,—and then, forward, quick march!”

“One has been picked out already,” said Nikolay, smiling.

“Oh!” said the uncle in surprise, looking inquiringly at Natasha. Natasha nodded her head with a happy smile.

“And such an one!” she said. But as soon as she said it a different, new series of ideas and feelings rose up within her. “What was the meaning of Nikolay’s smile when he said: ‘One has been picked out already’? Was he glad of it, or not glad? He seemed to think my Bolkonsky would not approve, would not understand our gaiety now. No, he would quite understand it. Where is he now?” Natasha wondered, and her face became serious at once. But that lasted only one second. “I mustn’t think, I mustn’t dare to think about that,” she said to herself; and smiling, she sat down again near the uncle, begging him to play them something more.

The uncle played another song and waltz. Then, after a pause, he cleared his throat and began to sing his favourite hunting song:—

The uncle sang, as peasants sing, in full and naive conviction that in a song the whole value rests in the words, that the tune comes of itself and that a tune apart is nothing, that the tune is only for the sake of the verse. And this gave the uncle’s unself-conscious singing a peculiar charm, like the song of birds. Natasha was in ecstasies over the uncle’s singing. She made up her mind not to learn the harp any