Anna Karenina - Part 3

She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs

was no longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The

barking of dogs showed the carriage had reached the village, and

all that was left was the empty fields all round, the village in

front, and he himself isolated and apart from it all, wandering

lonely along the deserted highroad.

He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he

had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and

feelings of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the

least like a shell. There, in the remote heights above, a

mysterious change had been accomplished. There was no trace of

shell, and there was stretched over fully half the sky an even

cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The sky had grown blue

and bright; and with the same softness, but with the same

remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.

"No," he said to himself, "however good that life of simplicity

and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love _her_."