With the child in his arms his figure was now more conspicuous than before, and a group of Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.

“Have you lost anyone, my dear fellow? You’re of the gentry yourself, aren’t you? Whose child is it?” they asked him.

Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat who had been sitting there with her other children, and he asked whether anyone knew where she had gone.

“Why, that must be the Anférovs,” said an old deacon, addressing a pockmarked peasant woman. “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!” he added in his customary bass.

“The Anférovs? No,” said the woman. “They left in the morning. That must be either Márya Nikoláevna’s or the Ivánovs’!”

“He says ‘a woman,’ and Márya Nikoláevna is a lady,” remarked a house serf.