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but I did not understand him then.”
“I can quite, quite believe it. How I feel that we might have been
friends!” she said; and, distressed at what she had said, she looked
round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.
“Yes, MIGHT HAVE BEEN,” he said mournfully. “He’s just one
of those people of whom they say they’re not for this world.”
“But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,” said Kitty,
glancing at her tiny watch.
Chapter 20.
The next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme
unction. During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His
great eyes, fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card table
covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and
hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passion-
ate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting
from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of
his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier
for him without faith, but had grown up because step by step the
contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed
out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was
not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his
intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desper-
ate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened his
hope by accounts of the marvelous recoveries she had heard of. Levin
knew all this; and it was agonizingly painful to him to behold the
supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with diffi-
culty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the promi-
nent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel
consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the
sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand