midnight
If he listened , it was to hear her voice raised in appeal at his door . If he closed his eyes , it was to see her image more plainly on the background of his consciousness . The stillness into which the house had sunk aided this absorption and made his battle a losing one . There was naught to distract his mind , and when he dozed , as he did for a while after midnight , it was to fall under the conjuring effect of dreams in which her form dominated with all the force of an unfettered fancy . The pictures which his imagination thus brought before him were startling and never to be forgotten . The first was that of an angry sea in the blue light of an arctic winter . Stars flecked the zenith and shed a pale lustre on the moving ice-floes hurrying toward a horizon of skurrying clouds and rising waves .