since he had felt
as he had expressed himself at the very bottom of the river? What had
changed his position? What had brought him out of his solitude? The most
ordinary, inevitable, though always unexpected event, death? Yes; but he
was not thinking so much of his wife's death and his own freedom, as of
this question--what answer would Lisa give Panshin? He felt that in the
course of the last three days, he had come to look at her with different
eyes; he remembered how after returning home when he thought of her in
the silence of the night, he had said to himself, "if only!"... That "if
only"--in which he had referred to the past, to the impossible had come
to pass, though not as he had imagined it,--but his freedom alone was
little. "She will obey her mother," he thought, "she will marry Panshin;
but even if she refuses him, won't it be just the same as far as I am
concerned?" Going up to the looking-glass he minutely scrutinised his
own face and shrugged his shoulders.

The day passed quickly by in these meditations; and evening came.
Lavretsky went to the Kalitins'. He walked quickly, but his pace
slackened as he drew near the house. Before the steps was standing
Panshin's light carriage. "Come," though Lavretsky, "I will not be an
egoist"--and he went into the house. He met with no one within-doors,
and there was no sound in the drawing-room; he opened the door and saw
Marya Dmitrievna playing picquet with Panshin. Panshin bowed to him
without speaking, but the lady of the house cried, "Well, this is
unexpected!" and slightly frowned. Lavretsky sat down near her, and
began to look at her cards.

"Do you know how to play picquet?" she asked him with a kind of hidden
vexation, and then declared that she had thrown away a wrong card.

Panshin counted ninety, and began calmly and urbanely taking tricks with
a severe and dignified expression of face. So it befits diplomatists
to play; this was no doubt how he played in Petersburg with some
influential dignitary, whom he wished to impress with a favourable
opinion of his solidity and maturity. "A hundred and one, a hundred and
two, hearts, a hundred and three," sounded his voice in measured tones,
and Lavretsky could not decide whether it had a ring of reproach or of
self-satisfaction.

"Can I see Marfa Timofyevna?" he inquired, observing that Panshin was
setting to work to shuffle the cards with still more dignity. There was
not a trace of the artist to be detected