Page 1620 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

where she was, and for a long while her trembling hands
could not find the matches and light another candle,
instead of the one that had burned down and gone out.
‘No, anything—only to live! Why, I love him! Why, he

loves me! This has been before and will pass,’ she said,
feeling that tears of joy at the return to life were trickling
down her cheeks. And to escape from her panic she went
hurriedly to his room.
He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up
to him, and holding the light above his face, she gazed a
long while at him. Now when he was asleep, she loved
him so that at the sight of him she could not keep back
tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he waked up he
would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was
right, and that before telling him of her love, she would
have to prove to him that he had been wrong in his
treatment of her. Without waking him, she went back,
and after a second dose of opium she fell towards morning
into a heavy, incomplete sleep, during which she never
quite lost consciousness.
In the morning she was waked by a horrible nightmare,
which had recurred several times in her dreams, even
before her connection with Vronsky. A little old man with
unkempt beard was doing something bent down over

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