12 o'clock at night
And the very cabs were not like the other cabs which one makes use of for ordinary purposes ! Certainly , the cabmen guessed . She felt sure of it , by the very way they looked at her , and the eyes of these Paris cabmen are terrible ! When one remembers they are constantly remembering , in the Courts of Justices , after a lapse of several years , faces of criminals whom they have only driven once , in the middle of the night , from some street or other to a railway station , and that they have to do with almost as many passengers as there are hours in the day , and that their memory is good enough for them to declare : `` That is the man whom I took up in the Rues des Martyrs , and put down at the Lyons Railway Station , at 12 o'clock at night , on July 10 , last year ! '' Is it not terrible when one risks what a young woman risks when she is going to meet her lover , and has to trust her reputation to the first cabman she meets ? In two years she had employed at least a hundred to a hundred and twenty in that drive to the Rue Miromesnil , reckoning only one a week , and they were so many witnesses , who might appear against her at a critical moment . As soon as she was in the cab , she took another veil , which was as thick and dark as a domino mask , out of her pocket , and put it on .