The gas jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat.  Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky’s face.  Vronsky bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to his hat and went on.  Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and disappear.  Vronsky went into the hall.  His brows were scowling, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.

“What a position!” he thought.  “If he would fight, would stand up for his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or baseness....  He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never meant and never mean to do.”

Vronsky’s ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with Anna in the Vrede garden.  Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of Anna—­who had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply looked to him to decide her fate, ready to submit to anything—­he had long ceased to think that their tie might end as he had thought then.  His ambitious plans had retreated into the background again, and feeling that he had got out of that circle of activity in which everything was definite, he had given himself entirely to his passion, and that passion was binding him more and more closely to her.

He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating footsteps.  He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him, and was now going back to the drawing room.

“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the tears came into her eyes.  “No; if things are to go on like this, the end will come much, much too soon.”

“What is it, dear one?”

“What?  I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours...No, I won’t...I can’t quarrel with you.  Of course you couldn’t come.  No, I won’t.”  She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time searching look.  She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not seen him.  She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was.

Chapter 3

“You met him?” she asked, when they had sat down at the table in the lamplight.  “You’re punished, you see, for being late.”

“Yes; but how was it?  Wasn’t he to be at the council?”

“He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again.  But that’s no matter.  Don’t talk about it.  Where have you been?  With the prince still?”

She knew every detail of his existence.  He was going to say that he had been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her thrilled and rapturous face, he was ashamed.  And he said he had had to go to report on the prince’s departure.