Anna tells him she is pregnant

The rain stops and Vronsky, glad of it because it means Anna will be at home, leaves the calèche before the bridge and comes through the garden. On the verandah steps he remembers Serezha, the hindrance he is always forgetting: in the boy's presence they talk as acquaintances, since they would think it unworthy to deceive a child, and the child, seeing that his father, governess and nurse regard this man with fear and loathing while his mother calls him her best friend, cannot work out what he ought to feel and concludes the fault is his own. He is the compass by which the two of them can read how far they have diverged from a course they will not name. Today he is out. Anna sits alone in white, pressing her forehead to a cold watering-can. Pressed to say what she was thinking of, she tells him: she is pregnant. He turns pale and bows his head. Then he says their fate is sealed and the falsehood must end — she must leave her husband.

The compass image is the novel's own summary of its plot, and Tolstoy assigns the instrument to an eight-year-old who thinks he is the one at fault. Anna reads Vronsky's silence as understanding and is wrong — he is feeling revulsion and relief that the crisis has arrived. Their whole future is decided on a misreading that takes one sentence to correct and never is.