five o’clock in the
afternoon
All the ordinary conditions of life , without which one can form no conception of anything , had ceased to exist for Levin . 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 .