To consent to a divorce, to give her her freedom, meant in his thoughts to take from himself the last tie that bound him to life--the children whom he loved; and to take from her the last prop that stayed her on the path of right, to thrust her down to her ruin.

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.