young, with long, prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and cap. This woman, swaying to and fro and muttering something, was choking with sobs. Two girls of about ten and twelve, dressed in dirty short frocks and cloaks, were staring at their mother with a look of stupefaction on their pale frightened faces. The youngest child, a boy of about seven, who wore an overcoat and an immense cap evidently not his own, was crying in his old nurse’s arms. A dirty, barefooted maid was sitting on a trunk, and, having undone her pale-colored plait, was pulling it straight and sniffing at her singed hair. The woman’s husband, a short, round-shouldered man in the undress uniform of a civilian official, with sausage-shaped whiskers and showing under his square-set cap the hair smoothly brushed forward over his temples, with expressionless face was moving the trunks, which were placed one on another, and was dragging some garments from under them.
As soon as she saw Pierre, the woman almost threw herself at his feet.
“Dear people, good Christians, save me, help me, dear friends … help us, somebody,” she muttered between her sobs. “My girl … My daughter! My youngest daughter is left behind. She’s burned! Ooh! Was it for this I nursed you. … Ooh!”
“Don’t, Márya Nikoláevna!” said her husband to her in a low voice, evidently only to justify himself before the stranger. “Sister must have taken her, or else where can she be?” he added.
“Monster! Villain!” shouted the woman angrily, suddenly ceasing to weep. “You have no heart, you don’t feel for your own child! Another man would have rescued her from the fire. But this is a monster and neither a man nor