Anna Karenina - Part 5

She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the

locket in which there was Seryozha's portrait when he was almost

of the same age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her

hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were

photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare

them, and began taking them out of the album. She took them all

out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in

a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and

smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression.

With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that

moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of

the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere, and she

could not get it out. There was no paper knife on the table, and

so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son's (it was

a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with

long hair), she used it to push out her son's photograph. "Oh,

here is he!" she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and

she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present

misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But

now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar

and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.

"But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?"

she thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting

she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She

sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing

heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which

she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he

would console her. The messenger returned with the answer that

he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately,

and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince

Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. "He's not coming

alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me," she

thought; "he's not coming so that I could tell him everything,

but coming with Yashvin." And all at once a strange idea came to

her: what if he had ceased to love her?

And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her

that she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea.

The fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact

that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in

Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as

though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face.