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 "These two only I love, and the one excludes the other. I cannot bring them together, and yet this is the one thing I want. If this were not so, it would be all the same,—all, all the same. It will end in some way; but I cannot, I will not, talk about this. So do not despise me, do not judge me. You in your purity could never imagine what I suffer!"

She sat down beside Dolly and, with a guilty expression in her eyes, took her hand.

"What do you think? What do you think of me? Do not despise me! I do not deserve that; I am miserably unhappy. If there is any one unhappy, it is I ...." said she, and, turning away, she began to weep.

After Anna left her, Dolly said her prayers and went to bed. She pitied Anna with all her soul while she was talking with her; but now she could not bring herself to think of her. Memories of home and her children arose in her imagination with new and wonderful joy. So dear and precious seemed this little world to her that she decided that nothing would tempt her to stay longer away from them, and that she would leave the next day.

Anna, meantime, returning to her dressing-room, took a glass, and poured into it several drops of a mixture containing chiefly morphine, and, having swallowed it, she sat a little while motionless, then went with a calm and joyous heart to her bedroom.

When she went into her sleeping-room, Vronsky looked scrutinizingly into her face. He was trying to discover some trace of the talk which he knew by the length of her stay in Dolly's room she must have had with her. But in her expression, which betrayed a certain repressed excitement, as if she were trying to conceal something, he found nothing except the beauty to which he was so accustomed, and which always intoxicated him, and the consciousness of it and the desire that it might still have its usual effect on him.

He did not like to ask her what they had been talking about, but hoped that she herself would tell him. But she only said:—

"I am glad you like Dolly; you do, don't you?"