midnight
It was clearly part of the state policy of Teutoburg to offer Miss Hicks , with the hand of its sovereign , an opportunity to replenish its treasury . What would the girl do ? Lansing could not guess ; yet he dimly felt that her attitude would depend in a great degree upon his own . And he knew no more what his own was going to be than on the night , four months earlier , when he had flung out of his wife 's room in Venice to take the midnight express for Genoa . The whole of his past , and above all the tendency , on which he had once prided himself , to live in the present and take whatever chances it offered , now made it harder for him to act . He began to see that he had never , even in the closest relations of life , looked ahead of his immediate satisfaction . He had thought it rather fine to be able to give himself so intensely to the fullness of each moment instead of hurrying past it in pursuit of something more , or something else , in the manner of the over-scrupulous or the under-imaginative , whom he had always grouped together and equally pitied .