Page 1523 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘What is it?...what is it?’ he said, half-asleep. ‘Kitty!
What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, coming from behind the screen
with a candle in her hand. ‘I felt unwell,’ she said, smiling

a particularly sweet and meaning smile.
‘What? has it begun?’ he said in terror. ‘We ought to
send...’ and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
‘No, no,’ she said, smiling and holding his hand. ‘It’s
sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all
over now.’
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay
down and was still. Though he thought her stillness
suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still
more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and
excitement with which, as she came from behind the
screen, she said ‘nothing,’ he was so sleepy that he fell
asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of
her breathing, and understood all that must have been
passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside
him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a
woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch
of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She
seemed struggling between regret at waking him, and the
desire to talk to him.

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