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 with me," she would even have abandoned her son, and gone with him. But what she told him did not produce on him at all the impression which she had expected; he seemed, if anything, vexed and angry.

"It was not hard for me at all. It came of its own accord," she said, with a touch of irritation; "and here"—she drew her husband's letter from her glove.

"I understand, I understand," interrupted Vronsky, taking the letter, but not reading it, and trying to calm Anna. "The one thing I wanted, the one thing I prayed for ....to put an end to this situation, so that I could devote my whole life to your happiness."

"Why do you say that to me?" she asked. "Can I doubt it? If I doubted...."

"Who are those coming?" asked Vronsky, abruptly, seeing two ladies coming in their direction. "Perhaps they know us." And he hastily drew Anna with him down a side alley.

"Akh! it is all the same to me," she said.

Her lips trembled, and it seemed to Vronsky that her eyes looked at him from under her veil with strange hatred.

"As I said, in all this affair, I cannot doubt you. But here is what he wrote me. Read it."

And again she halted. Again, as when he first learned of Anna's rupture with her husband, Vronsky, beginning to read this letter, involuntarily abandoned himself to the impression awakened in him by the thought of his relations to the deceived husband. Now that he had the letter in his hand, he imagined the challenge, which he would receive that day or the next, and the duel itself, at the moment when, with the same cool and haughty expression which now set his face, he would stand in front of his adversary, and, having discharged his weapon in the air, would wait the outraged husband's shot. And at this very instant Serpukhovskoï's words and what he himself had felt that day flashed through his mind, "Better not tie yourself down;" and she knew that he could not express his thought before her.