Several minutes passed; a half hour passed.  Lavretsky still stood there, clenching the fatal note in his hand, and gazing unmeaningly on the floor.  A sort of dark whirlwind seemed to sweep round him, pale faces to glimmer through it.

A painful sensation of numbness had seized his heart.  He felt as if he were falling, falling, falling—­into a bottomless abyss.

The soft rustle of a silk dress roused him from his torpor by its familiar sound.  Varvara Pavlovna came in hurriedly from out of doors.  Lavretsky shuddered all over and rushed out of the room.  He felt that at that moment he was ready to tear her to pieces, to strangle her with his own hands, at least to beat her all but to death in peasant fashion.  Varvara Pavlovna, in her amazement, wanted to stay him.  He just succeeded in whispering “Betty”—­and then he fled from the house.

Lavretsky took a carriage and drove outside the barriers.  All the rest of the day, and the whole of the night he wandered about, constantly stopping and wringing his hands above his head.  Sometimes he was frantic with rage, at others every thing seemed to move him to laughter, even to a kind of mirth.  When the morning dawned he felt half frozen, so he entered a wretched little suburban tavern, asked for a room, and sat down on a chair before the window.  A convulsive fit of yawning seized him.  By that time he was scarcely able to keep upright, and his bodily strength was utterly exhausted.  Still he was not conscious of fatigue.  But fatigue had its own way.  He continued sitting there and gazing vacantly, but he comprehended nothing.  He could not make out what had happened to him, why he found himself there, alone, in an empty, unknown room, with numbed limbs, with a sense of bitterness in his mouth, with a weight like that of a great stone on his heart.  He could not understand what had induced her, his Varvara, to give herself to that Frenchman, and how, knowing herself to be false to him, she could have remained as calm as ever in his presence, as confiding and caressing as ever towards him.  “I cannot make it out,” whispered his dry lips.  “And how can I be sure now that even at St. Petersburg—?” but he did not complete the question; a fresh gaping fit seized him, and his whole frame shrank and shivered.  Sunny and sombre memories equally tormented him.  He suddenly recollected how a few days before, she had sat at the piano, when both he and Ernest were present, and had sung “Old husband, cruel husband!” He remembered the expression of her face, the strange brilliance of her eyes, and the color in her cheeks—­and he rose from his chair, longing to go to them and say, “You were wrong to play your tricks on me.  My great grandfather used to hang his peasants on hooks by their ribs, and my grandfather was a peasant himself,”—­and then kill them both.  All of a sudden it would appear to him as if every thing that had happened were a dream, even not so much as a dream, but just some absurd fancy; as if he had only to give himself a shake and take a look round—­and he did look round; and as a hawk claws a captured bird, so did his misery strike deeper and deeper into his heart.  What made things worse was that Lavretsky had hoped, in the course of a few months, to find himself once more a father.  His past, his future, his whole life was poisoned.