midnight
You are too young to understand this as you will some day -- '' `` The trouble with me , '' I blurted out , `` is that I 've never had much to do with good women -- only with my mother and Mrs. Fogg -- and they could never have anything said against them -- neither of them ! '' `` Where have you lived all your life ? '' he asked . Then I told him of the way I had picked up my hat and come up instead of being brought up , of the women along the canal , of her who called herself Alice Rucker , of the woman who stole across the river with me -- but I did n't mention her name -- of as much as I could think of in my past history ; and all the time Elder Thorndyke gazed at me with increasing interest , and with something the look we have in listening to tales of midnight murder and groaning ghosts . I must have been an astonishing sort of mystery to him . Certainly I was a castaway and an outcast to his ministerial mind ; and boy as I was , he seemed to feel for me a sort of awed respect mixed up a little with horror . `` Heavenly Father ! ''