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The group of revolutionaries who strolled behind Natacha stopped to confer. In three maybe two minutes, they would be surrounded cut off, taken in the trap.
He stopped Natacha and planted himself in front of her. "Why, mademoiselle, did you not answer me earlier?" "Because I don't wish to have any conversation with you." "If that was so, you would not have come here, where you were sure I would follow." She hesitated, with an emotion that would have been incomprehensible to all others perhaps, but was not to Rouletabille.
But Natacha, to our great surprise, has not wished it to be so. No, she has not wished it, saying that there is always time to think of her wedding and that she is in no hurry to leave us. Meantime she entertains herself with this Michael as if she did not fear his passion, and neither has Michael the desperate air of a man who knows the definite engagement of Natacha and Boris.
Some exceptional service called him, without doubt, very early to the Court. "Why, what are you doing here? You are not yet gone then, Monsieur Roidetabille?" "Politeness before everything, Monsieur le Grand-Marechal! I would not go before saying 'Au revoir' to the Emperor. "Your scheme, doubtless, is to speak to him once more regarding Natacha Feodorovna?" "Not at all.
"Certainly it is Natacha, Natacha herself," exclaimed Ivan Petrovitch, who had used his glasses the better to see whom the young French journalist was looking at. "Ah, the dear child! she has wanted to see Annouchka for a long time." "What, Natacha! So it is. So it is. Natacha! Natacha!" said the others. "And with Boris Mourazoff's parents."
Natacha, to whom the Mélukows were devoted, soon vanished with them to their own room, where corks and various articles of men's clothing were brought to them, and clutched by bare arms through a half-open door. Ten minutes later all the young people of the house rejoined the company, equally unrecognizable.
If Natacha were innocent, as Rouletabille still wished to believe, such an attitude was simply incomprehensible. And the girl could not but be aware she would increase Koupriane's suspicions.
"How? standing up or lying down?" "I saw him at first there was nothing; then suddenly I saw him lying down." "André, lying down? Then he is ill!" And Natacha gazed horror-stricken at her companion. "Not at all; he seemed quite cheerful, on the contrary," said she, beginning to believe in her own inventions. "And then Sonia, what then?" "Then I saw only confusion red and blue."
Very close to the bank he saw by examination of the soil, where there was no more trace of tiny heels and little soles, that the woman who had been found there was carried, and carried, into a boat, of which the place of fastening to the bank was still visible. "They have carried off Natacha," he cried in a surge of anguish. "bungler that I am, that is my fault too all my fault all my fault!
Something in her inmost soul told her that this evening would seal her fate. In a few minutes four sleighs with three horses abreast to each, their harness jingling with bells, drew up in a line before the steps, the runners creaking and crunching over the frozen snow. Natacha was the foremost, and the first to tune her spirits to the pitch of this carnival freak.
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