As he was coming away from the Kalitins, Lavretsky met Panshin; they bowed coldly to one another.

Lavretsky went to his lodgings, and locked himself in.

He was experiencing emotions such as he had hardly ever experienced before.

How long ago was it since he had thought himself in a state of peaceful petrifaction?
How long was it 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.