midnight
I ask not your answer now . Collect your thoughts , -- recover your jaded and scattered spirits . It wants two hours of midnight . Before midnight I will be with you . '' `` Incomprehensible being ! '' replied the Englishman , `` I would leave the life you have preserved in your own hands ; but what I have seen this night has swept even Viola from my thoughts . A fiercer desire than that of love burns in my veins , -- the desire not to resemble but to surpass my kind ; the desire to penetrate and to share the secret of your own existence -- the desire of a preternatural knowledge and unearthly power .