three o'clock
But the cab was there ; and within it the girl was waiting for him . The driver , after taking up his fare , had at her direction drawn over to the further curb , out of the fringe of the rabble which besieged the St. Luke Building in constantly growing numbers , and through which Maitland , too impatient to think of leaving by the basement exit , had elbowed and fought his way in an agony of apprehension that brooked no hindrance , heeded no difficulty . He dashed round the corner , stopped short with a sinking heart , then as the cabby 's signaling whip across the street caught his eye , fairly hurled himself to the other curb , pausing at the wheel , breathless , lifted out of himself with joy to find her faithful in this ultimate instance . She was recovering , whose high spirit and recuperative powers were to him then and always remained a marvelous thing ; and she was bending forth from the body of the hansom to welcome him with a smile that in a twinkling made radiant the world to him who stood in a gloomy side street of New York at three o'clock of a summer 's morning , -- a good hour and a half before the dawn . For up there in the tower of the sky-scraper he had as much as told her of his love ; and she had waited ; and now -- and now he had been blind indeed had he failed to read the promise in her eyes . Weary she was and spent and overwrought ; but there is no tonic in all the world like the consciousness that where one has placed one 's love , there love has burgeoned in response . And despite all that she had suffered and endured , the happiness that ran like soft fire in her Veins , wrapping her being with its beneficent rapture , had deepened the color in her cheeks and heightened the glamour in her eyes .