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Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexey

Alexandrovitch always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a

third person in his interviews with his wife.

Chapter 27

Anna was upstairs, standing before the looking-glass, and, with

Annushka's assistance, pinning the last ribbon on her gown when

she heard carriage wheels crunching the gravel at the entrance.

"It's too early for Betsy," she thought, and glancing out of the

window she caught sight of the carriage and the black hat of

Alexey Alexandrovitch, and the ears that she knew so well

sticking up each side of it. "How unlucky! Can he be going to

stay the night?" she wondered, and the thought of all that might

come of such a chance struck her as so awful and terrible that,

without dwelling on it for a moment, she went down to meet him

with a bright and radiant face; and conscious of the presence of

that spirit of falsehood and deceit in herself that she had come

to know of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and began

talking, hardly knowing what she was saying.