“How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty.  “In pain!”

“In pain, where?”

“Everywhere.”

“It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna.  Though it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed was very keen, must have heard.  Levin said hush to her, and looked round at the sick man.  Nikolay had heard; but these words produced no effect on him.  His eyes had still the same intense, reproachful look.

“Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into the corridor.

“He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.

“How do you mean?”

“Like this,” she said, tugging at the folds of her woolen skirt.  Levin noticed, indeed, that all that day the patient pulled at himself, as it were, trying to snatch something away.

Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true.  Towards night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes.  Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same.  Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the dying.

While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of life; his eyes were closed.  Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna stood at the bedside.  The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer when the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes.  The priest, on finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly returned it to the stand, and after standing for two minutes more in silence, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold.

“He is gone,” said the priest, and would have moved away; but suddenly there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man that seemed glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds: 

“Not quite...soon.”

And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying out the corpse.

The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in Levin that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma, together with the nearness and inevitability of death, that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had come to him.  This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.  But now, thanks to his wife’s presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair.  In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love.  He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer.  The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.