an hour after midnight
Very soon the guests dispersed and the bungalow was still for the night . One or two waited to hear what the doctor had to say , and went away satisfied in the knowledge that the heat had been too much for Mrs. Wilder , and , but for that event , the dinner-party would have been forgotten after two days . Hartley was the last to leave , and the sound of trotting hoofs grew faint along the road . By an hour after midnight nearly the whole white population can be presumed to be asleep ; day wakes early in the East , and there are few who keep all-night hours , because morning calls men from their beds to their work , and even this hot , sultry night people lay on their beds and tried to sleep ; but in the small bungalow where the Rev. Francis Heath lived with a solitary Sapper officer , the bed that he slept in was smooth and unstirred by restless tossing inside the mosquito net . The Rev. Francis was out , sitting by the bed of a dying parishioner . He watched the long hours through , dressed as he had been in the afternoon , in a grey flannel suit , his thin neck too long and too spare for his all-around collar , and as he watched sometimes and sometimes prayed , he too felt the pressure of the night . The woman he prayed beside was dying and quite unconscious of his presence .