Minutes--those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away--seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes.

He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o'clock in the afternoon.

If he had been told it was only ten o'clock in the morning, he would not have been more surprised.

Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything.