to live, provided only her horrible agonies might be ended.
"Doctor, what does that mean? My God!" he said, seizing the doctor's arm as he went in.
"It is the end," replied the doctor; and his face was so serious, as he said this, that Levin thought he meant that Kitty was dead.
Not knowing what would become of him, he went back to the bedroom.
What he first saw was Lizavyeta Petrovna's face; it was even more than before portentous and stern. It was no longer Kitty's face that was there; in the place where it had been before, there was something terrible both by reason of the agony which contracted it, and by reason of the sound that came from it. He bowed his head against the wooden frame of the bed, feeling that his heart would burst. The awful shriek still continued, it grew more piercing than ever, as if the last summit of horror had been reached. Then suddenly the shriek ceased. He could not believe it, but he could not doubt; and he heard a gentle rustling and a quick breathing, and his wife's living, loving, happy voice whispered, "Kanetchna—It is over!"
He raised his head. As she lay there, beautiful with a supernatural beauty, with her arms nervelessly resting on the counterpane, she looked at him, and tried to smile at him, but could not.
Coming suddenly out of that mysterious and terrible world where he had been living for twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself transported back into his ordinary every-day world of luminous happiness, and he could not bear it. The cords long tense snapped. He burst into tears; and the sobs of joy which he could not foresee shook his whole body so violently that he could not speak.
He knelt beside Kitty, and pressed his lips on her hand, and her gentle fingers answered his caress. And meantime, at the foot of the bed, in the skilful hands of Lizavyeta Petrovna, like the small, uncertain flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being, which just
