five
o'clock
Daphne -- the skimmer of many books -- remembered how Renan -- _ sain et sauf _ -- had sent a challenge to his own end , and defying the possible weakness of age and sickness , had demanded to be judged by the convictions of life , and not by the terrors of death . She tried to fortify her own mind by the recollection . * * * * * The first days of June broke radiantly over the great gorge and the woods which surround it . One morning , early , between four and five o'clock , Daphne came in , to find Madeleine awake and comparatively at ease . Yet the preceding twenty-four hours had been terrible , and her nurses knew that the end could not be far off . The invalid had just asked that her couch might be drawn as near to the window as possible , and she lay looking towards the dawn , which rose in fresh and windless beauty over the town opposite and the white splendour of the Falls . The American Fall was still largely in shadow ; but the light struck on the fresh green of Goat Island and leaped in tongues of fire along the edge of the Horseshoe , turning the rapids above it to flame and sending shafts into the vast tower of spray that holds the centre of the curve .