y; I'd only just that minute gone
out."

Alexey Alexandrovitch took the telegrams and opened them. The
first telegram was the announcement of Stremov's appointment to
the very post Karenin had coveted. Alexey Alexandrovitch flung
the telegram down, and flushing a little, got up and began to
pace up and down the room. "_Quos vult perdere dementat_," he
said, meaning by _quos_ the persons responsible for this
appointment. He was not so much annoyed that he had not received
the post, that he had been conspicuously passed over; but it was
incomprehensible, amazing to him that they did not see that the
wordy phrase-monger Stremov was the last man fit for it. How
could they fail to see how they were ruining themselves, lowering
their _prestige_ by this appointment?

"Something else in the same line," he said to himself bitterly,
opening the second telegram. The telegram was from his wife.
Her name, written in blue pencil, "Anna," was the first thing
that caught his eye. "I am dying; I beg, I implore you to come.
I shall die easier with your forgiveness," he read. He smiled
contemptuously, and flung down the telegram. That this was a
trick and a fraud, of that, he thought for the first minute,
there could be no doubt.

"There is no deceit she would stick at. She was near her
confinement. Perhaps it is the confinement. But what can be
their aim? To legitimize the child, to compromise me, and
prevent a divorce," he thought. "But something was said in it: I
am dying...." He read the telegram again, and suddenly the plain
meaning of what was said in it struck him.

"And if it is true?" he said to himself. "If it is true that in
the moment of agony and nearness to death she is genuinely
penitent, and I, taking it for a trick, refuse to go? That would
not only be cruel, and everyone would blame me, but it would be
stupid on my part."

"Piotr, call a coach; I am going to Petersburg," he said to his
servant.

Alexey Alexandrovitch decided that he would go to Petersburg and
see his wife. If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing
and go away again. If she was really in danger, and wished to
see him before her death, he would forgive her if he found her
alive, and pay her the last duties if he came too late.

All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do.

With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in
the train, in the early fog of Petersburg Alexey Alexandrovitch
drove