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42
ANNA KARENINA

moment coming out of the little house with Mlle. Linon, and looking at him with a gentle, affectionate smile, as if he were a beloved brother. "Is it my fault? Have I done anything very bad? People say, 'Coquetry.' I know that I don't love him, but it is pleasant to be with him, and he is such a splendid fellow. But what made him say that?"....

Seeing Kitty departing with her mother, who had come for her, Levin, flushed with his violent exercise, stopped and pondered. Then he took off his skates, and joined the mother and daughter at the gate.

"Very glad to see you," said the princess; "we receive on Thursdays, as usual."

"To-day, then?"

"We shall be very glad to see you," she answered coolly.

This coolness troubled Kitty, and she could not restrain her desire to temper her mother's chilling manner. She turned her head, and said, with a smile, "We shall see you, I hope."[1]

At this moment Stepan Arkadyevitch, with hat on one side, with animated face and bright eyes, entered the garden. But as he came up to his wife's mother, he assumed a melancholy and humiliated expression, and replied to the questions which she asked about Dolly's health. When he had finished speaking in a low and broken voice with his mother-in-law, he straightened himself up, and took Levin's arm.

"Now, then, shall we go?" I have been thinking of you all the time, and I am very glad that you came," he said, with a significant look into his eyes.

"Come on, come on," replied the happy Levin, who did not cease to hear the sound of a voice saying, "We shall see you soon, I hope," or to recall the smile that accompanied the words.

"At the Anglia, or at the Hermitage?"

"It's all the same to me."

"At the Anglia, then," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, making this choice because he owed more there than at

  1. Simply da svidanya, equivalent to au revoir.