Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 13
Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her conversation
with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of the two figures: Kitty with
the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy smile looking upwards at Levin, and
his handsome figure bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute
on the table and the next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It
meant, “Then I could not answer differently.”
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
“Only then?”
“Yes,” her smile answered.
“And n...and now?” he asked.
“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like–should like so much!” she wrote
the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what
happened.”
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the
initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have
never ceased to love you.”
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
“I understand,” she said in a whisper.
He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without asking
him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.
For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked
into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she
had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed
to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she
read them over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”
“You’re playing secrétaire?” said the old prince. “But we must really be getting
along if you want to be in time at the theater.”
Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said that she loved
him, and that she would tell her father and mother that he would come tomorrow
morning.
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