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"Ah, but you are a crusty fellow, friend!" said the count. For sole reply Daniel gave him a shy, childlike, meek, and amiable smile. The old count went home, and Natasha and Petya promised to return very soon, but as it was still early the hunt went farther. At midday they put the hounds into a ravine thickly overgrown with young trees. Nicholas standing in a fallow field could see all his whips.
Though by the twentieth of August nearly all the Rostovs' acquaintances had left Moscow, and though everybody tried to persuade the countess to get away as quickly as possible, she would not hear of leaving before her treasure, her adored Petya, returned. On the twenty-eighth of August he arrived.
Besides, all the same I can't study now when..." Petya stopped short, flushed till he perspired, but still got out the words, "when our Fatherland is in danger." "That'll do, that'll do nonsense...." "But you said yourself that we would sacrifice everything." "Petya! Be quiet, I tell you!" cried the count, with a glance at his wife, who had turned pale and was staring fixedly at her son.
"Here he is... our own... Kolya, * dear fellow... How he has changed!... Where are the candles?... Tea!..." * Nicholas. "And me, kiss me!" "Dearest... and me!" Sonya, Natasha, Petya, Anna Mikhaylovna, Vera, and the old count were all hugging him, and the serfs, men and maids, flocked into the room, exclaiming and oh-ing and ah-ing. Petya, clinging to his legs, kept shouting, "And me too!"
Poor dear, he's as white as a sheet!" various voices were heard saying. Petya soon came to himself, the color returned to his face, the pain had passed, and at the cost of that temporary unpleasantness he had obtained a place by the cannon from where he hoped to see the Emperor who would be returning that way. Petya no longer thought of presenting his petition.
The count, Petya, Madame Schoss, Mavra Kuzminichna, and Vasilich came into the drawing room and, having closed the doors, they all sat down and remained for some moments silently seated without looking at one another. The count was the first to rise, and with a loud sigh crossed himself before the icon. All the others did the same.
Directly I crossed the threshold of his door, Tarhov came resolutely, rapidly, to meet me, and his eyes sparkling and glowing, his face grown handsomer and radiant, he said firmly and briskly: 'Listen, Petya, my boy; I guess what you've come for, and what you want to talk about; but I give you warning, if you say a single word about her, or about her action, or about what, according to you, is the course dictated to me by common sense, we're friends no longer, we're not even acquainted, and I shall beg you to treat me as a stranger.
"Cowardly Zinotchka gazed at me intently, and convincing herself that I really did know all about it, clutched my hand in despair and muttered in a trembling whisper: "'Petya, it is low. . . . I beg of you, for God's sake. . . . Be a man . . . don't tell anyone. . . . Decent people don't spy . . . . It's low. . . . I entreat you.
He wrote from the province of Voronezh where he had been sent to procure remounts, but that letter did not set the countess at ease. Knowing that one son was out of danger she became the more anxious about Petya.
In the dark Petya recognized his own horse, which he called "Karabakh" though it was of Ukranian breed, and went up to it. "Well, Karabakh! We'll do some service tomorrow," said he, sniffing its nostrils and kissing it. "Why aren't you asleep, sir?" said a Cossack who was sitting under a wagon. "No, ah... Likhachev isn't that your name? Do you know I have only just come back!
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