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 "Do not let me disturb you," said Levin, and he sat down by the window. "Did you sleep well?"

"Like the dead. Is it a good day for hunting?"

"What do you drink, tea or coffee?"

"Neither; I always go down to breakfast; I am mortified at being so late. The ladies, I suppose, are already up? Splendid time for a ride! You must show me your horses."

After walking around the garden, examining the stable, and performing a few gymnastic exercises together on the parallel bars. Levin and his guest returned to the house and went into the drawing-room,

"We had splendid sport and got so many new impressions," said Veslovsky, approaching Kitty, who was sitting near the samovar. "What a pity that ladies are deprived of this pleasure!"

"Well, of course he must have something to say to the lady of the house," thought Levin. Again he detected something peculiar in the smile and in the triumphant air with which his guest behaved toward Kitty.

The princess, who was sitting on the other side of the table with Marya Vlasyevna and Stepan Arkadyevitch, called Levin to her and began to broach her idea that they should go to Moscow for Kitty's confinement, and explained to him how the rooms should be prepared for her.

Just as all the preparations for his wedding had seemed distasteful to Levin because they were so insignificant in comparison with the majesty of the event itself, so now even more humiliating were all the preparations for the approaching confinement, the time of which they were reckoning up on their fingers. He tried to shut his ears to all the talk about the various kinds of swaddling-clothes for the unborn infant; he did his best to shut his eyes to all the mysterious and numberless bands and triangular pieces of linen to which Dolly seemed to attribute special importance and the like.

The event of the birth of a son—for he was firmly persuaded that it would be a son—seemed to him so