`Well, how is he?' Kitty asked with a frightened face.

`Oh, it's awful, it's awful! What did you come for?' said Levin.

Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands.

`Kostia! Take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. Only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,' she said. `You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!' she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.

Levin was obliged to agree, and, regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again in to his brother with Kitty.

Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sickroom, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man's bedside, and going up so that he would not have to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh young hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and inoffensive, which is peculiar merely to women.

`We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden,' she said. `You never thought I was to be your sister.'

`You would not have recognized me?' he said, with a smile which had become radiant at her entrance.

`Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has passed that Kostia has not mentioned you, and been anxious.'

But the sick man's interest did not last long.

Before she had finished speaking, there had come back into his face the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living.

`I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,' she said, turning away from his fixed stare, and looking about the room. `We must ask about another room,' she said to her husband, `so that we might be nearer.'