there; and, with the aid of an old chambermaid of the princess's, he climbed up to get it from the cabinet; and, in doing so, broke a little lamp, and the old woman consoled him for this accident, and encouraged him about his wife. And he had carried the image to Kitty, and placed it at. her head, carefully arranging it behind her pillow. But where, when, and why all this was done was more than he could tell.
Neither did he comprehend why the old princess took him by the hand, and, looking at him compassionately, begged him to calm himself; or why Dolly tried to persuade him to eat something, and led him from the room; or why even the doctor looked at him gravely and sympathetically, and offered him a pill.
He knew and felt conscious only that what was occurring was like that which had occurred the year before at the hotel of the government city, by the death-bed of his brother Nikolaï. That was grief, this was happiness. But that grief and this happiness were in the same way outside of the ordinary conditions of life; were in this peculiar life, as it were, the loopholes through which appeared something higher. And in exactly the same way, while the hard, painful event was accomplishing before him, in exactly the same way incomprehensible, his soul, at the contemplation of this loftiness, raised itself to a height which he had never before dreamed possible, and whither his reason could not follow.
"Lord, have mercy and aid us," he kept repeating, in spite of his long lack of practice, and yet feeling that he was addressing God with the same simplicity, the same confidence, as in his childhood and early youth. All this time he seemed to be leading two separate existences; one was away from Kitty, with the doctor smoking one fat cigarette after another, and knocking the ashes off against the rim of the unemptied ash-tray; or with Dolly and the old princess, who insisted on talking about dinner, politics, or the illness of Marya Petrovna, and with whom Levin suddenly, for an instant, would forget entirely what was taking place, and feel wide awake; and the other was in her presence, by her bed-
