seven o'clock
Alban , turning upon his pillow , sighed in his sleep . A neighboring church clock struck six ; there were workmen going down to the city which must now awake to the labors of the day . Captain Willy Forrest admitted that he had few virtues , but he never charged himself with the vice of idleness . In town or out of it , his trim man-servant , Abel , would wake him at seven o'clock and see that he had a cup of tea and the morning papers by a quarter-past . Fine physical condition was one of the ambitions of this lithe shapely person , whose father had been a jockey and whose mother had not forgotten to the day of her death the manner in which measurements are taken upon a counter . Willy Forrest , by dint of perseverance , had really come to believe that these worthy parents never existed but in his imagination . To the world he was the second son of the late Sir John Forrest , Bart. , whose first-born , supposed to be in Africa , had remained beyond the pale for many years .