over a new leaf completely now. I've done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money's the last consideration; I don't regret it. So long as there's health - and my health, thank God, is quite restored.'

Levin listened and racked his brains, but could think of nothing to say. Nikolai probably felt the same; he began questioning his brother about his affairs; and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because then he could speak without hypocrisy. He told his brother of his plans and his doings.

His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested.

These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words.

Both of them now had only one thought - the illness of Nikolai and the nearness of his death - which stifled all else. But neither of them dared speak of it, and so, whatever they said - without uttering the one thought that filled their minds - was all falsehood. Never had Levin been so glad when the evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never with any outside person, never on any official visit, had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening. And the consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more unnatural. He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live.

As the house was damp, and only the one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom, behind a partition.

His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, tossed about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his throat clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he said, `Oh, my God!' Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily, `Ah, the devil!' Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various kinds, but the end of all his thoughts was the same - death.

Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half-asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself, too, that he felt this. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, in thirty years - wasn't it all the same? And what was this inevitable death - he did not know, had never thought about it, and, what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it.

`I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten - death.'

He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and, holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that, in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact - that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.

`But I am alive still. What's to be done now - what's to be done?' he asked in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously, went to the looking glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolenka, who lay there breathing with what was left of his lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fiodor Bogdanich was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fiodor Bogdanich could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. `And now that warped, hollow chest... And I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore....'