On the way back Nikoláy drove at a steady pace instead of racing and kept peering by that fantastic all-transforming light into Sónya’s face and searching beneath the eyebrows and mustache for his former and his present Sónya from whom he had resolved never to be parted again. He looked and recognizing in her both the old and the new Sónya, and being reminded by the smell of burnt cork of the sensation of her kiss, inhaled the frosty air with a full breast and, looking at the ground flying beneath him and at the sparkling sky, felt himself again in fairyland.

“Sónya, is it well with thee ?” he asked from time to time.

“Yes!” she replied. “And with thee ?”

When halfway home Nikoláy handed the reins to the coachman and ran for a moment to Natásha’s sleigh and stood on its wing.