Levin heard the words, and they impressed him. “How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants?” he thought, recalling all his fears and doubts of late. “What do I know? what can I do in this fearful business,” he thought, “without help? Yes, it is help I want now.”
When the deacon had finished the prayer for the Imperial family, the priest turned to the bridal pair with a book: “Eternal God, that joinest together in love them that were separate,” he read in a gentle, piping voice: “who hast ordained the union of holy wedlock that cannot be set asunder, Thou who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca and their descendants, according to Thy Holy Covenant; bless Thy servants, Konstantin and Ekaterina, leading them in the path of all good works. For gracious and merciful art Thou, our Lord, and glory be to Thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and ever shall be.”
“Amen!” the unseen choir sent rolling again upon the air.
“ ‘Joinest together in love them that were separate.’ What deep meaning in those words, and how they correspond with what one feels at this moment,” thought Levin. “Is she feeling the same as I?”
And looking round, he met her eyes, and from their expression he concluded that she was understanding it just as he was. But this was a mistake; she almost completely missed the meaning of the words of the service; she had not heard them, in fact. She could not listen to them and take them in, so strong was the one feeling that filled her breast and grew stronger and stronger. That feeling was joy at the completion of the process that for the last month and a half had been going on in her soul, and had during those six weeks been a joy and a torture to her. On the day when in the drawing-room of the house in Arbaty Street she had gone up to him in her brown dress, and given herself to him without a word—on that day, at that hour, there took place in her heart a complete severance from all her old life, and a quite different, new, utterly strange