Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/671

 giving no thought to what he had believed a half-hour previously, and apparently ashamed even to remember it, asked for a bottle of iodin to inhale.

Levin gave him the bottle, which was covered with a piece of perforated paper, and his brother looked at him with the same imploring, passionate look which he had given the image, as if asking him to confirm the words of the doctor, who attributed miraculous virtues to the inhaling of iodin.

"Kitty isn't here?" he asked in his hoarse whisper, when Levin had unwilhngly repeated the doctor's words,

"No? then I may speak! ... I played the comedy for her sake. .... She is so sweet! But you and I cannot deceive ourselves! This is what I put my faith in," said he, pressing the bottle in his bony hands as he smelt the iodin.

About eight o'clock in the evening Levin and his wife were taking tea in their room, when Marya Nikolayevna came running toward them all out of breath. She was pale, and her lips trembled.

"He is dying!" she whispered, "I am afraid that he is dying!"

Both of them hurried to Nikolaï. He had lifted himself, and was sitting up in bed leaning on his elbow, his head bowed, his long back bent.

"How do you feel?" asked Levin, tenderly, after a moment of silence.

"I feel that I am going," whispered Nikolaï, struggling painfully to speak, but as yet pronouncing the words distinctly. He did not raise his head, but only turned his eyes up, without seeing his brother's face.

"Katya, go away!" he whispered once again.

Levin sprang up and in an imperative whisper bade her leave the room.

"I am going," the dying man whispered once again.

"Why do you think so?" asked Levin, for the sake of saying something.

"Because I am going," he repeated, as if he had an affection for the phrase. "It is the end."

Marya Nikolayevna came to him.