The shadow on the cornice

For the first time they are at enmity a whole day, which Anna reads as complete estrangement. She invents the cruel words he might have said — go back to your husband, how many roubles do you want — and refuses to forgive them. She sets herself a test: if he comes despite the maid's message he still loves her. He believes the message and goes to his room. Death then presents itself as the way to revive his love, punish him, and win the contest an evil spirit in her is waging. Pouring her usual dose of opium, she thinks how easy it would be to drink the whole phial — until the shadow of the screen spreads across the cornice, the candle gutters out, and terror makes her want only to live. She goes to the study, holds the light over him asleep, and weeps with tenderness. A second dose brings the old nightmare of the peasant muttering French over iron. In the morning she sees Princess Sorokina's daughter in a lilac hat hand Vronsky a parcel. She tells him she will not go tomorrow, says he will repent of this, and watches him drive off without looking up at the window.

The chapter is built on tests Anna sets and loses, and on two visions: the shadows on the cornice that send her back to life, and the peasant with the iron, returning from before Vronsky. Tolstoy gives Vronsky the smallest of exits — a page turned, a glove put on, no glance at the window — so that nothing he does is cruel and everything is final.