“Two telegrams,” said his manservant, coming into the room.  “I beg your pardon, your excellency; I’d only just that minute gone out.”

Alexey Alexandrovitch took the telegrams and opened them.  The first telegram was the announcement of Stremov’s appointment to the very post Karenin had coveted.  Alexey Alexandrovitch flung the telegram down, and flushing a little, got up and began to pace up and down the room. “Quos vult perdere dementat,” he said, meaning by quos the persons responsible for this appointment.  He was not so much annoyed that he had not received the post, that he had been conspicuously passed over; but it was incomprehensible, amazing to him that they did not see that the wordy phrase-monger Stremov was the last man fit for it.  How could they fail to see how they were ruining themselves, lowering their prestige by this appointment?

“Something else in the same line,” he said to himself bitterly, opening the second telegram.  The telegram was from his wife.  Her name, written in blue pencil, “Anna,” was the first thing that caught his eye.  “I am dying; I beg, I implore you to come.  I shall die easier with your forgiveness,” he read.  He smiled contemptuously, and flung down the telegram.  That this was a trick and a fraud, of that, he thought for the first minute, there could be no doubt.

“There is no deceit she would stick at.  She was near her confinement.  Perhaps it is the confinement.  But what can be their aim?  To legitimize the child, to compromise me, and prevent a divorce,” he thought.  “But something was said in it:  I am dying....”  He read the telegram again, and suddenly the plain meaning of what was said in it struck him.

“And if it is true?” he said to himself.  “If it is true that in the moment of agony and nearness to death she is genuinely penitent, and I, taking it for a trick, refuse to go?  That would not only be cruel, and everyone would blame me, but it would be stupid on my part.”

“Piotr, call a coach; I am going to Petersburg,” he said to his servant.

Alexey Alexandrovitch decided that he would go to Petersburg and see his wife.  If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and go away again.  If she was really in danger, and wished to see him before her death, he would forgive her if he found her alive, and pay her the last duties if he came too late.

All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do.

With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in the train, in the early fog of Petersburg Alexey Alexandrovitch drove through the deserted Nevsky and stared straight before him, not thinking of what was awaiting him.  He could not think about it, because in picturing what would happen, he could not drive away the reflection that her death would at once remove all the difficulty of his position.  Bakers, closed shops, night-cabmen, porters sweeping