wn the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and
went out, where they were, he did not know. The princess was
with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table
set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but
Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere.
Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this
eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later
on he found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then
he had been sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The
doctor had answered and then had said something about the
irregularities in the municipal council. Then he had been sent
to the bedroom to help the old princess to move the holy picture
in its silver and gold setting, and with the princess's old
waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had
broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure
him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy
picture and set it at Kitty's head, carefully tucking it in
behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had
happened, he could not tell. He did not understand why the old
princess took his hand, and looking compassionately at him,
begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat
something and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked
seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a drop of
something.

All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had
happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at
the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief--
this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all
the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were,
in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of
something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime
something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which
it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind,
unable to keep up with it.

"Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" he repeated to himself
incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed,
complete alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as
trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.

All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was
away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat
cigarette after anoth