About five o'clock
But in the office on the top floor , where the man stood alone , there was no longer any doubt . Whether the fire was checked or whether it swept onward mattered now to him not at all ; he was looking into the eyes of ruin utter and absolute ... . But this , perhaps , is premature , since before this day was to arrive much water was to flow under many bridges , and it is with the flowing of some of that water that this story has to deal . About five o'clock , Charles Wilkinson called , as he often did , through inclinations in which the gastronomic and the amatory were about evenly divided . Long since , after a series of titanic but perfectly hopeless struggles , he had abandoned all direct attempts to borrow money from his opulent step-uncle ; subsequent efforts to achieve indirectly the same result by a myriad of methods admirably subtle and of marked ingenuity had resulted only in equal failure . To be sure , there had never been any really valid reason why his endeavors should have been successful unless as compensation for years of patient labor . He conceived his esteemed relation as a sort of safe-deposit box , to a share of whose contents he was entitled if he could contrive to open it .