six o'clock
Glumly reverting to his morning paper , he began to read and reread with dogged persistence each item of politics and foreign news -- each gibbering advertisement . At noon the postman dropped some kind of a message through the slit in the door , but the plainly discernible green one-cent stamp forbade any possible hope that it was a letter from the South . At four o'clock again someone thrust an offensive pink gas bill through the letter-slide . At six o'clock Stanton stubbornly shut his eyes up perfectly tight and muffled his ears in the pillow so that he would not even know whether the postman came or not . The only thing that finally roused him to plain , grown-up sense again was the joggle of the janitor 's foot kicking mercilessly against the bed . `` Here 's your supper , '' growled the janitor . On the bare tin tray , tucked in between the cup of gruel and the slice of toast loomed an envelope -- a real , rather fat-looking envelope .