than usual, and came at eight o'clock, without having eaten anything, to morning prayers and confession.
There was no one in the church except a mendicant soldier, two old women, and the officiating priests. A young deacon with a long, thin back clearly defined in two halves beneath his short cassock came to meet him, and going to a little table near the wall, began to read prayers. Levin, hearing him repeat in a hurried, monotonous voice, clipping his words, the words, "Lord, have mercy upon us,"[1] felt that his thought was locked up and sealed, and that to touch it and stir it now was out of the question, since, if he did, confusion would ensue; and therefore he stood behind the deacon, not listening and not trying to fathom what he said, but thinking his own thoughts.
"What a wonderful amount of expression there is about her hands," he thought, recalling the evening before, which he had spent with Kitty at the table in one corner of the drawing-room. There had not been much to talk about, as was usually the case at this time; she had rested her hand on the table, opening and shutting it, and laughing as she made this motion. He remembered how he had kissed this hand and then examined the lines that crossed the pink palm.
"Have merc' on us again," thought Levin, making the sign of the cross, and bowing, while he noticed the deacon's supple movements, as he prostrated himself in front of him. "Then she took my hand, and in turn examined it. 'You have a famous hand,' she said to me." He looked at his own hand, and then at the deacon's, with its stubbed fingers. "Yes! Now it will soon be over. No; he is beginning another prayer. Yes; he is bowing to the ground; that always comes just before the end."
The deacon took the three-ruble note, discreetly slipped into his hand, under his rough shaggy cuff, and promised to register Levin's name; then quickly clacking in his new boots across the flagstones of the empty church, he went to the altar. In a moment he looked
- ↑ Gospodi pomiluï, shortened by his rapid speech into pomilos, pomilos.
