He started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic onto his knees.

His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep.

The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone.

"You may trample me in the mud," he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch's words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna's face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away from his face.

He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position and shut his eyes.