He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she could not scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andréy ran to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.
“What have they taken a baby in there for?” thought Prince Andréy in the first second. “A baby? What baby … ? Why is there a baby there? Or is the baby born?”
Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill he began to cry, sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out of the room. Prince Andréy turned to him, but the doctor gave him a bewildered look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and seeing Prince Andréy stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into his wife’s room. She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming childlike face with its upper lip covered with tiny black hair.
“I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done to me?”—said her charming, pathetic, dead face.
In a corner of the room something red and tiny gave a grunt and squealed in Márya Bogdánovna’s trembling white hands.
Two hours later Prince Andréy, stepping softly, went into his father’s room. The old man already knew everything. He was standing close to the door and as soon as it opened his rough old arms closed like a vise round his son’s neck, and without a word he began to sob like a child.
Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andréy went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And