eleven o'clock at night
She embraced the broken-hearted girl , and tried to soothe her , but in vain . The long delirium and subsequent weakness , -- combined with the secret trouble on her mind , -- had deprived poor Thelma of all resisting power , and she wept on and on in Ulrika 's arms till nature was exhausted , and she could weep no longer . Then she lay motionless , with closed eyes , utterly drained in body and spirit , scarcely breathing , and , save for a shivering moan that now and then escaped her , she seemed almost insensible . Ulrika watched her with darkening , meditative brows , -- she listened to the rush of the storm-wind without , -- it was past eleven o'clock at night . She began to count on her fingers -- it was the sixteenth day since the birth of the child , -- sixteen days exactly since she had written to Sir Philip Errington , informing him of his wife 's danger -- and the danger was not yet past . Thinking over all that had happened , and the apparent hopelessness of the case , she suddenly took a strange idea into her head . Retiring to a distant corner , she dropped on her knees .