ivided from him, and it was impossible to set this
right.

She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the
locket in which there was Seryozha's portrait when he was almost
of the same age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her
hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were
photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare
them, and began taking them out of the album. She took them all
out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in
a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and
smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression.
With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that
moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of
the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere, and she
could not get it out. There was no paper knife on the table, and
so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son's (it was
a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with
long hair), she used it to push out her son's photograph. "Oh,
here is he!" she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and
she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present
misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But
now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar
and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.

"But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?"
she thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting
she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She
sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing
heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which
she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he
would console her. The messenger returned with the answer that
he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately,
and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince
Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. "He's not coming
alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me," she
thought; "he's not coming so that I could tell him everything,
but coming with Yashvin." And all at once a strange idea came to
her: what if he had ceased to love her?

And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her
that she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea.
The fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact