eight o'clock
Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day 's calamity brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith these men had placed in him , and the losses which his own mistaken security had caused them . Granted he could neither guess nor avert the trickery which had brought about his failure ; but none the less did he feel that he had failed them ; none the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they showed him sting him like a scourge . He got away from them at last , and wandered out alone into the gardens of the Stephanien , till the green trees of an alley shut him in in solitude , and the only echo of the gay world of Baden was the strain of a band , the light mirth of a laugh , or the roll of a carriage sounding down the summer air . It was eight o'clock ; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless splendor , bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow , and tinging to bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest . In another hour he was the expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party , where all that was highest , fairest , greatest , most powerful , and most bewitching of every nationality represented there would meet ; and in the midst of this radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure , where every man worth owning as such was his friend , and every woman whose smile he cared for welcomed him , he knew himself as utterly alone , as utterly doomed , as the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house . No aid could serve him , for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it ; no power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the farthest would mark him out forever an exiled , beggared , perhaps dishonored man -- a debtor and an alien . Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash , trying vainly to realize this thing which had come upon him -- and to meet which not training , nor habit , nor a moment 's grave reflection had ever done the slightest to prepare him ; gazing , blankly and unconsciously , at the dense pine woods and rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and around above the green and leafy nest of Baden -- he watched mechanically the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in distance through the firs .