She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in which there was Seryozha’s portrait when he was almost of the same age as the girl.  She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were photographs of her son at different ages.  She wanted to compare them, and began taking them out of the album.  She took them all out except one, the latest and best photograph.  In it he was in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and smiling lips.  It was his best, most characteristic expression.  With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere, and she could not get it out.  There was no paper knife on the table, and so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair), she used it to push out her son’s photograph.  “Oh, here is he!” she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery.  She had not once thought of him all the morning.  But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.

“But where is he?  How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son.  She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her.  The messenger returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg.  “He’s not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me,” she thought; “he’s not coming so that I could tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin.”  And all at once a strange idea came to her:  what if he had ceased to love her?

And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea.  The fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face.

“But he ought to tell me so.  I must know that it is so.  If I knew it, then I know what I should do,” she said to herself, utterly unable to picture to herself the position she would be in if she were convinced of his not caring for her.  She thought he had ceased to love her, she felt close upon despair, and consequently she felt exceptionally alert.  She rang for her maid and went to her dressing room.  As she dressed, she took more care over her appearance than she had done all those days, as though he might, if he had grown cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had dressed and arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her.