Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 12
during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once. He
recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the carriage
that had crossed over to the other side of the road, and was rapidly disappearing,
there only could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so
agonizingly upon him of late.
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.”
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