o had gathered round began
carefully laying out the corpse.

The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in
Levin that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma,
together with the nearness and inevitability of death, that had
come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had come to
him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less
than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of
death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible
than ever. But now, thanks to his wife's presence, that feeling
did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death, he felt the
need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair,
and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still
stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved,
had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had
arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.

The doctor confirmed his suppositions in regard to Kitty. Her
indisposition was a symptom that she was with child.

Chapter 21

From the moment when Alexey Alexandrovitch understood from his
interviews with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that
was expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without
burdening her with his presence, and that his wife herself
desired this, he felt so distraught that he could come to no
decision of himself; he did not know himself what he wanted now,
and putting himself in the hands of those who were so pleased to
interest themselves in his affairs, he met everything with
unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left his house,
and the English governess sent to ask him whether she should dine
with him or separately, that for the first time he clearly
comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most
difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not
in any way connect and reconcile his past with what was now. It
was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that
troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of
his wife's unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already;
that state was painful, but he could understand it. If his wife
had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he
would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in
the hopeless position--incomprehensible to himself--in which he
felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate p