his study,
and he turned hurriedly to her.

"By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all."

"From whom is the telegram?" she asked, not hearing him.

"From Stiva," he answered reluctantly.

"Why didn't you show it to me? What secret can there be between
Stiva and me?"

Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the
telegram.

"I didn't want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a
passion for telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?"

"About the divorce?"

"Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet.
He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it
is; read it."

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what
Vronsky had told her. At the end was added: "Little hope; but
I will do everything possible and impossible."

"I said yesterday that it's absolutely nothing to me when I get,
or whether I never get, a divorce," she said, flushing crimson.
"There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me." "So
he may hide and does hide his correspondence with women from me,"
she thought.

"Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov," said Vronsky;
"I believe he's won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay,
about sixty thousand."

"No," she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this
change of subject that he was irritated, "why did you suppose
that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to
hide it? I said I don't want to consider it, and I should have
liked you to care as little about it as I do."

"I care about it because I like definiteness," he said.

"Definiteness is not in the form but the love," she said, more
and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool
composure in which he spoke. "What do you want it for?"

"My God! love again," he thought, frowning.

"Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children's in the
future."

"There won't be children in the future."

"That's a great pity," he said.

"You want it for the children's sake, but you don't think of me?"
she said, quite forgetting or not having heard that he had said,
"_for your sake_ and the children's."

The question of the possibility of having children had long been
a subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have
children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.

"Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake," he
repeated, frowning as though in pain, "because