before. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch felt that she pitied him and was on the point of crying. A wave of feeling overwhelmed him. He seized her fat hand and kissed it.
"My friend," she said again, in a voice breaking with emotion, "you must not give yourself up to grief. Your grief is great, but you must find consolation."
"I am wounded, I am killed, I am no longer a man," said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, letting go the countess's hand, but still looking into her eyes swimming with tears. "My situation is all the more unbearable because I can find neither in myself nor outside of myself any help toward endurance of it."
"You will find this help, not in me, though I beg you to believe in my friendship," said she, with a sigh. "Our help is love, the love which He has given for an inheritance. His yoke is easy," she continued, with the exalted look that Alekseï Aleksandrovitch knew so well. "He will sustain you and will aid you."
Although these words were the expression of an emotion aroused by their lofty feelings, as well as the symbolical language characteristic of a new mystical exaltation just introduced into Petersburg, and which seemed extravagant to Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, nevertheless he found it pleasant at the present time to hear them.
"I am weak, I am humiliated. I foresaw nothing of this, and now I cannot understand it."
"My friend!" repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
"I do not mourn so much my loss," said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch; "but I cannot help a feeling of shame for the situation in which I am placed before the world. It is bad, and I cannot, I cannot bear it."
"It is not you who have performed this noble act of forgiveness which has filled me—and all—with admiration. It is He dwelling in your heart. So, too, you have no cause for shame," said the countess, ecstatically raising her eyes.
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch frowned, and, pressing his hands together, be began to make his knuckles crack.
