eight o'clock
He was like a man whose skin has been taken off ; he winced at everything , but all the same , he did his work in the hospital with exhausting thoroughness ; to be sure he gave his patients nothing but technical care . Whether they lived or died was nothing to David ; whether he himself lived or died was still less to him -- except , perhaps , that in his own case he had a preference . But work is the only real sedative for grief , and the suffering man worked himself callous , so he had dull moments of forgetfulness , or at any rate of comparative indifference , Yet when he received that note from Mrs. Maitland summoning him to her hotel he flinched under the callousness . However , at a little before eight o'clock on Tuesday morning , he knocked at her bedroom door . The Girard House knew Sarah Maitland 's eccentricities as well as her credit ; she always asked for a cheap room , and was always put up under the roof . She had never learned to use her money for her own comfort , so it never occurred to her to have a parlor for herself ; her infrequent callers were always shown up here to the top of the house . On this especial morning she had come directly from the train , and when David arrived she was pacing up and down the narrow room , haggard and disheveled from a night in the sleeping-car ; she had not even taken off her bonnet .