He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her face.

“What do you wish of me?” he said simply and seriously.

“I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty’s forgiveness,” she said.

“You don’t wish that?” he said.

He saw she was saying what she forced herself to say, not what she wanted to say.

“If you love me, as you say,” she whispered, “do so that I may be at peace.”

His face grew radiant.

“Don’t you know that you’re all my life to me?  But I know no peace, and I can’t give it to you; all myself—­and love...yes.  I can’t think of you and myself apart.  You and I are one to me.  And I see no chance before us of peace for me or for you.  I see a chance of despair, of wretchedness...or I see a chance of bliss, what bliss!...  Can it be there’s no chance of it?” he murmured with his lips; but she heard.

She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said.  But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no answer.

“It’s come!” he thought in ecstasy.  “When I was beginning to despair, and it seemed there would be no end—­it’s come!  She loves 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.