andsome figure
bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on
the table and the next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had
understood. It meant, "Then I could not answer differently."

He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.

"Only then?"

"Yes," her smile answered.

"And n...and now?" he asked.

"Well, read this. I'll tell you what I should like--should like
so much!" she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h.
This meant, "If you could forget and forgive what happened."

He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and
breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase,
"I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to
love you."

She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.

"I understand," she said in a whisper.

He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and
without asking him, "Is it this?" took the chalk and at once
answered.

For a long while he could not understand what she had written,
and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness.
He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming
eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And
he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when
she read them over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the
answer, "Yes."

"You're playing _secretaire_?" said the old prince. "But we must
really be getting along if you want to be in time at the
theater."

Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.

In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said
that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother
that he would come tomorrow morning.

Chapter 14

When Kitty had gone and Levin was left alone, he felt such
uneasiness without her, and such an impatient longing to get as
quickly, as quickly as possible, to tomorrow morning, when he
would see her again and be plighted to her forever, that he felt
afraid, as though of death, of those fourteen hours that he had
to get through without her. It was essential for him to be with
someone to talk to, so as not to be left alone, to kill time.
Stepan Arkadyevitch would have been the companion most congenial
to him, but he was going out, he said, to a _soiree_, in reality to
the ballet. Levin only had time to tell him he was happy, and
that he loved him, and would never, never forget what he had done
for him. The eyes and t