Ten o'clock
Though well aware that she was playing this night with the sharpest of edged tools , till her messengers should return and her combinations should close , Jess was perfectly able and willing to give herself up to the game of conversational give-and-take with Ebie Farrish . She was a girl of few genteel accomplishments , but with her gipsy charm and her frankly pagan nature she was fitted to go far . Over the manse of Dullarg , still and grey , with only the two men in it ; over the low-walled rectangular farm steading of Craig Ronald , fell alike the midsummer night . Ten o'clock on an early July evening is in Galloway but a modified twilight . But as the sun went down behind the pines he sent an angry gleam athwart the green braes . The level cloud-band into which he plunged drew itself upward to the zenith , and , like the eyelid of a gigantic eye , shut down as though God in his heaven were going to sleep , and the world was to be left alone . It was the dark of the moon , and even if there had been full moon its light would have been as completely shut out by the cloud canopy as was the mild diffusion of the blue-grey twilight .