All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions.  One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash tray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing.  And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had come upon him the first minute.  Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her.  But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed:  “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them.  He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.

Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.

He did not know whether it was late or early.  The candles had all burned out.  Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down.  Levin sat listening to the doctor’s stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his cigarette.  There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion.  He had completely forgotten what was going on now.  He heard the doctor’s chat and understood it.  Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek.  The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor.  The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.  Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as strange.  “I suppose it must be so,” he thought, and still sat where he was.  Whose scream was this?  He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the princess, and took up his position at Kitty’s pillow.  The scream had subsided, but there was some change now.  What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend.  But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta Petrovna.  Lizaveta Petrovna’s face was stern and pale, and still as resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed intently on Kitty.  Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes.  Her lifted hands asked for his hands.  Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.