four o'clock in the afternoon of the 6th of September
Philip listened with growing interest , sometimes amused , sometimes indignant , as the remorseless prosecutor ploughed his way through the witnesses , whom he bullied into admissions that they were certain of nothing , and that in the dusk of that far-off evening , the man whom they had sworn at the time to be quite unlike him , might in reality have been Brown . Philip got greatly interested in this question . He took up the opposite side himself with much heat , feeling as sure as if he had been there that it was not Brown : and he was delighted in his excitement , when there stood up one man who would not be bullied , a man who had the air of a respectable clerk of the lower class , and who held his own . He had been an office boy , the son apparently of the housekeeper in charge of the premises referred to when the incident occurred , and the gist of his evidence was that the prisoner at the bar -- so awful a personage once to the little office boy , so curtly discussed now as Brown -- had left the office at four o'clock in the afternoon of the 6th of September , and had not appeared again . `` A different gentleman altogether came in the evening , a much taller man , with a large moustache . '' `` Where was it that you saw this man ? '' `` Slipping in at the side door of the office as if he did n't want to be seen . ''