He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go in to see him.  She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow; the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.

“Well, how is he? how is he?”

“Very bad.  He can’t get up.  He has kept expecting you.  He....  Are you...with your wife?”

Levin did not for the first moment understand what it was confused her, but she immediately enlightened him.

“I’ll go away.  I’ll go down to the kitchen,” she brought out.  “Nikolay Dmitrievitch will be delighted.  He heard about it, and knows your lady, and remembers her abroad.”

Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not know what answer to make.

“Come along, come along to him!” he said.

But as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened and Kitty peeped out.  Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more.  She positively shrank together and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say and what to do.

For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.

“Well! how is he?” she turned to her husband and then to her.

“But one can’t go on talking in the passage like this!” Levin said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though about his affairs.

“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, “or go on; go, and then come for me,” she said, and went back into the room.

Levin went to his brother’s room.  He had not in the least expected what he saw and felt in his brother’s room.  He had expected to find him in the same state of self-deception which he had heard was so frequent with the consumptive, and which had struck him so much during his brother’s visit in the autumn.  He had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked—­greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things.  He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree.  And he had prepared himself for this; but he found something utterly different.

In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls filthy with spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay covered with a quilt, a body.  One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake-handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to the middle.  The head lay sideways on the pillow.  Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and tense, transparent-looking forehead.