drink which he poured out and gave the invalid from a spoon; now he saw the nurse's white hands, then Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's singular attitude as he knelt on the floor by the bed.
"Sleep, and forget," he said to himself, with the calm resolution of a man in good health who knows that when he feels tired he can sleep if he will. His ideas became confused; he felt himself falling into the abyss of forgetfulness. The billows of the sea of unconscious life were already beginning to swell over his head, when suddenly something like a violent electric shock passed through him. He started up so abruptly that his body bounded upon the springs of the divan; and he found himself in his terror on his knees. His eyes were as wide open as if he had not slept at all. The heaviness of his head and the lassitude which he felt in all his members but a moment before had suddenly vanished.
"You may drag me in the mire."
These words of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch rang in his ears. He saw him standing before him; he saw, too, Anna's feverish face, and her brilliant eyes looking tenderly, not at him, but at Alekseï Aleksandrovitch; he saw the stupid, ridiculous figure he must have presented when Alekseï Aleksandrovitch drew away his hands from his face. Again he threw himself back on the divan, and closed his eyes.
"Sleep, and forget," he repeated to himself.
But though his eyes were closed he saw clearer than ever Anna's face, just as it looked on that memorable evening of the races.
"It's impossible, and will not be; how can she efface this from her memory? I cannot live without this! But how can we be reconciled? how can we be reconciled?"
He unconsciously pronounced these words aloud, and their mechanical repetition for some minutes prevented the recollections and forms which besieged his brain from returning. But the repetition of the words did not long deceive his imagination. Again, one after the
