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 Not once had she thought of him all the morning; but now suddenly the sight of this manly and noble face, which she knew and loved so well, brought a flood of affection to her heart.

"Yes! Where is he? Why does he leave me alone, a prey to my grief?" she asked with bitter reproach, forgetting that she herself had carefully concealed from him everything concerning her son. She sent a message to him, asking him to come to her immediately, and waited, with heavy heart, thinking over the words with which she should tell him all, and the loving expressions with which he would try to console her. The servant returned to say that Vronsky had a visitor, but that he would come very soon; and would like to know if she could receive him with Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg.

"He will not come alone, and he has not seen me since yesterday at dinner," she thought; "and he does not come so that I can speak with him, but he comes with Yashvin."

And suddenly a cruel thought crossed her mind: what if he no longer loved her?

And as she went over in her mind all the incidents of the past few days, she found her terrible thought confirmed by them. The day before he had not dined with her; they did not have the same room, now that they were in Petersburg; and now he was bringing some one with him as if to avoid being alone with her.

"But he must tell me this. I must know it. If it is true, I know what I must do," she said to herself, wholly unable to imagine what would happen if Vronsky's indifference should prove to be true. She began to feel that he did not love her any more; she imagined herself reduced to despair, and in consequence her feelings made her overexcited; she rang for her maid, went into her dressing-room, and took extreme pains with her dress as if the sight of her toilet and becoming way of dressing her hair would bring back Vronsky's love, if he had grown indifferent.

The bell rang before she was ready.