the nursery.
Leaving his tea, and regretfully interrupting the interesting
conversation, and at the same time uneasily wondering why he had
been sent for, as this only happened on important occasions,
Levin went to the nursery.
Although he had been much interested by Sergey Ivanovitch's views
of the new epoch in history that would be created by the
emancipation of forty millions of men of Slavonic race acting
with Russia, a conception quite new to him, and although he was
disturbed by uneasy wonder at being sent for by Kitty, as soon as
he came out of the drawing room and was alone, his mind reverted
at once to the thoughts of the morning. And all the theories of
the significance of the Slav element in the history of the world
seemed to him so trivial compared with what was passing in his
own soul, that he instantly forgot it all and dropped back into
the same frame of mind that he had been in that morning.
He did not, as he had done at other times, recall the whole train
of thought--that he did not need. He fell back at once into the
feeling which had guided him, which was connected with those
thoughts, and he found that feeling in his soul even stronger and
more definite than before. He did not, as he had had to do with
previous attempts to find comforting arguments, need to revive a
whole chain of thought to find the feeling. Now, on the
contrary, the feeling of joy and peace was keener than ever, and
thought could not keep pace with feeling.
He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars that had
come out in the darkening sky, and suddenly he remembered. "Yes,
looking at the sky, I thought that the dome that I see is not a
deception, and then I thought something, I shirked facing
something," he mused. "But whatever it was, there can be no
disproving it! I have but to think, and all will come clear!"
Just as he was going into the nursery he remembered what it was
he had shirked facing. It was that if the chief proof of the
Divinity was His revelation of what is right, how is it this
revelation is confined to the Christian church alone? What
relation to this revelation have the beliefs of the Buddhists,
Mohammedans, who preached and did good too?
It seemed to him that he had an answer to this question; but he
had not time to formulate it to himself before he went into the
nursery.
Kitty was standing with her sleeves tucked up over the baby in
the bath. Hearing her husband's footstep,
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