By the note of terror in her voice he recognized his wife and stopped.
“I’ve been waiting an hour for you, I’m all frozen,” and her teeth chattered with the cold.
“What has happened? Come.”
“No. No. Listen, Nastya! I came in and found her standing before the mirror, making faces just like him, waving her hands like him.”
“Come.”
By main force he dragged the resisting Popadya into the living room, and there, looking around in fear, she told him more. While on her way into the living room to water the plants she had found Nastya, standing still before the mirror, and in the mirror she had seen the reflection of her face, not as it always looked, but oddly idiotic, with a savagely contorted mouth and squinting eyes. Then, still in silence, Nastya raised up her hands, and curving her fingers convulsively like the idiot, she stretched them out towards her own reflection in the mirror—and everything was so still, and all this was so terrible and unreal that the Popadya screamed and dropped her water pot. And Nastya ran away. And row she did not know whether it had really happened or her own imagination had been playing a trick on her.
“Call Nastya and step out!” ordered the priest.
Nastya came and stopped on the threshold. Her face was long and scraggy like her father’s, and when she was talking she copied his posture: her neck extended, inclined a little to one side, looking sullenly askance from beneath her eyebrows. And she held her hands behind her back just as he was in the habit of doing.
“Nastya, why do you do these things?” firmly, but calmly inquired Father Vassily.
“What things?”