midnight
He had been hard-bitten in his youth and trained in a hard , grim school . In the Isle of Skye he had seen the little cabin where his mother lived pulled down to make more room for a fifty-thousand-acre deer-forest . He had seen his mother beg . He had worked his way to Edinburgh , toiled at starvation wages for the sake of leave to learn at night , burned midnight oil , and failed at the end of it , through ill health , to pass for his degree . He had loved as only hard-hammered men can love , and had married after a struggle the very thought of which would have melted the courage of an ordinary man , only to see his wife die when her child was born . And even then , in that awful hour , he had not felt the utterness of misery such as came to him when he saw that his work in Howrah was undone . He had given of his best , and all his best , and it seemed that he had given it for nothing .