`What do you wish of me?' he said, simply and gravely.

`I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty's forgiveness,' she said.

`That is not your wish,' he said.

He saw she was saying what she was forcing herself to say, not what she wanted to say.

`If you love me, as you say,' she whispered, `you will do this, so that I may be at peace.'

His face grew radiant.

`Don't you know that you're all my life to me? But I know no peace, and I can't give it to you; all of myself, and love - yes. I can't think of you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I see no possibility before us of peace - either for me or for you. I see a possibility of despair, of wretchedness.... Or else I see a possibility of happiness - and what a happiness!... Can it be impossible?' he added, his lips barely moving - yet she heard.

She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no answer.

`It's come!' he thought in ecstasy. `When I was beginning to despair, and it seemed there would be no end - it's come! She loves me! She owns it!'

`Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be friends,' she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.

`Friends we shall never be - that you know yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the most wretched of people - that lies within your power.'

She would have said something, but he interrupted her.

`For I ask but one thing: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer - even as I am doing now. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is painful to you.'

`I don't want to drive you away.'

`Only don't change anything - leave everything as it is,' said he, in a shaky voice. `Here's your husband.'

At that instant Alexei Alexandrovich did in fact walk into the room with his calm, ungainly gait.

Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the house, and, sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his unhasty, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, as if he were teasing someone.

`Your Rambouillet is in full conclave,' he said looking round at all the party; `the graces and the muses.'

But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his - sneering, as she called it, using the English word, and like a clever hostess she at once brought him around to a serious conversation on the subject of universal conscription. Alexei Alexandrovich was immediately carried away by the subject, and began seriously defending the new imperial decree before Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.

Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.

`This is getting indecorous,' whispered one lady, with an expressive glance at Madame Karenina, her husband and Vronsky.