He had stood through the litany, the evening service and the midnight service, and the next day he got up earlier than usual, and without having tea went at eight o’clock in the morning to the church for the morning service and the confession.
There was no one in the church but a beggar soldier, two old women, and the church officials. A young deacon, whose long back showed in two distinct halves through his thin undercassock, met him, and at once going to a little table at the wall read the exhortation. During the reading, especially at the frequent and rapid repetition of the same words, “Lord, have mercy on us!” which resounded with an echo, Levin felt that thought was shut and sealed up, and that it must not be touched or stirred now or confusion would be the result; and so standing behind the deacon he went on thinking of his own affairs, neither listening nor examining what was said. “It’s wonderful what expression there is in her hand,” he thought, remembering how they had been sitting the day before at a corner table. They had nothing to talk about, as was almost always the case at this time, and laying her hand on the table she kept opening and shutting it, and laughed herself as she watched her action. He remembered how he had kissed it and then had examined the lines on the pink palm. “Have mercy on us again!” thought Levin, crossing himself, bowing, and looking at the supple spring of the deacon’s back bowing before him. “She took my hand then and examined the lines. ‘You’ve got a splendid hand,’ she said.” And he looked at his own hand and the short hand of the deacon. “Yes, now it will soon be over,” he thought. “No, it seems to be beginning again,” he thought, listening to the prayers. “No, it’s just ending: there he is bowing down to the ground. That’s always at the end.”
The deacon’s hand in a plush cuff accepted a three-rouble note unobtrusively, and the deacon said he would put it down in the register, and his new boots creaking jauntily over the flagstones of the empty church, he went to the altar. A moment later he peeped out thence and