ten o’clock in the morning
He lost all sense of time . 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 . He saw her swollen face , sometimes bewildered and in agony , sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him . He saw the old princess too , flushed and overwrought , with her gray curls in disorder , forcing herself to gulp down her tears , biting her lips ; he saw Dolly too and the doctor , smoking fat cigarettes , and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm , resolute , reassuring face , and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face .