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“Please, ask it.”
“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d,
t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, “When you told me it could never be,
did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no likelihood that she
could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as
though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced
at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and
began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking
him, “Is it what I think?”
“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.
“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.
“It means NEVER,” she said; “but that’s not true!”
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk,
and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.
Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her
conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of
the two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy
smile looking upwards at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over
the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the
next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant,
“Then I could not answer differently.”
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
“Only then?”
“Yes,” her smile answered.
“And n...and now?” he asked.
“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so
much!” she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, “If you
could forget and forgive what happened.”
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and break-
ing it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to
forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
“I understand,” she said in a whisper.
He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and
without asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.
For a long while he could not understand what she had written,
and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He
could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes,
beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote
three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them
over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”
“You’re playing secretaire?” said the old prince. “But we must
really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”
Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said
that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that
he would come tomorrow morning.