If she were divorced, he knew she would join her life to Vronsky's, and their tie would be an illegitimate and criminal one, since a wife, by the interpretation of the ecclesiastical law, could not marry while her husband was living.

"She will join him, and in a year or two he will throw her over, or she will form a new tie," thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.

" And I, by agreeing to an unlawful divorce, shall be to blame for her ruin.