Page 1167 - ANNA KARENINA
P. 1167
Anna Karenina
The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and began kissing
her hand again.
Seryozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his
mother by one hand and his nurse by the other, pattered
on the rug with his fat little bare feet. The tenderness
shown by his beloved nurse to his mother threw him into
an ecstasy.
‘Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she
comes...’ he was beginning, but he stopped, noticing that
the nurse was saying something in a whisper to his
mother, and that in his mother’s face there was a look of
dread and something like shame, which was so strangely
unbecoming to her.
She went up to him.
‘My sweet!’ she said.
She could not say good-bye, but the expression on her
face said it, and he understood. ‘Darling, darling Kootik!’
she used the name by which she had called him when he
was little, ‘you won’t forget me? You...’ but she could not
say more.
How often afterwards she thought of words she might
have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and
could say nothing. But Seryozha knew all she wanted to
say to him. He understood that she was unhappy and
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