Anna Karenina - Part 3

"How beautiful!" he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,

mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right

over his head in the middle of the sky. "How exquisite it all is

in this exquisite night! And when was there time for that

cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky, and there was

nothing in it--only two white streaks. Yes, and so

imperceptibly too my views of life changed!"

He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards

the village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and

sullen. The gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the

dawn, the full triumph of light over darkness.

Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the

ground. "What's that? Someone coming," he thought, catching the

tinkle of bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a

carriage with four horses harnessed abreast was driving towards

him along the grassy road on which he was walking. The

shaft-horses were tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the

dexterous driver sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts,

so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the road.

This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could

be, he gazed absently at the coach.

In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the

window, evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in

both hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light

and thought, full of a subtle, complex inner life, that was

remote from Levin, she was gazing beyond him at the glow of the

sunrise.

At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the

truthful eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face

lighted up with wondering delight.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in

the world. There was only one creature in the world that could

concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It

was she. It was Kitty. He understood that she was driving to

Ergushovo from the railway station. And everything that had been

stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions

he had made, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his

dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the carriage

that had crossed over to the other side of the road, and was

rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the solution of

the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly upon him

of late.