me! She owns it!"

"Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be
friends," she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite
differently.

"Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we
shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people--that's in
your hands."

She would have said something, but he interrupted her.

"I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as
I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and
I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful
to you."

"I don't want to drive you away."

"Only don't change anything, leave everything as it is," he said
in a shaky voice. "Here's your husband."

At that instant Alexey Alexandrovitch did in fact walk into the
room with his calm, awkward gait.

Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the
house, and sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his
deliberate, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter,
ridiculing someone.

"Your Rambouillet is in full conclave," he said, looking round at
all the party; "the graces and the muses."

But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his--
"sneering," as she called it, using the English word, and like a
skillful hostess she at once brought him into a serious
conversation on the subject of universal conscription. Alexey
Alexandrovitch was immediately interested in the subject, and
began seriously defending the new imperial decree against
Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.

Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.

"This is getting indecorous," whispered one lady, with an
expressive glance at Madame Karenina, Vronsky, and her husband.

"What did I tell you?" said Anna's friend.

But not only those ladies, almost everyone in the room, even the
Princess Myakaya and Betsy herself, looked several times in the
direction of the two who had withdrawn from the general circle,
as though that were a disturbing fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch was
the only person who did not once look in that direction, and was
not diverted from the interesting discussion he had entered upon.

Noticing the disagreeable impression that was being made on
everyone, Princess Betsy slipped someone else into her place to
listen to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and went up to Anna.

"I'm always amazed at the clearness and precision of your
husband's language," she said. "The most transcendental ideas
seem to be within