Page 608 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud
shell he had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the

ideas and feelings of that night. There was nothing in the
sky in the least like a shell. There, in the remote heights
above, a mysterious change had been accomplished. There
was no trace of shell, and there was stretched over fully
half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets.
The sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same
softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his
questioning gaze.
‘No,’ he said to himself, ‘however good that life of
simplicity and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love
HER.’

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