midnight
The money he won by his pen in the medical journals he was able to save . He knew how necessary money was in all the turning-points of life , and he denied himself every pleasure and every luxury in order to save a sum which should serve him in time of need . Matilda Carrington was one of those quiet women who seem to take no interest in the world around them , and to be happy without the pleasures which delight other women . She lived quite alone , without one female friend or acquaintance , and she saw little of her son , whose midnight studies and medical practice absorbed almost every hour of his existence . Her life , therefore , was one long solitude , and but for the companionship of her birds and two Angora cats , she would have been almost as much alone as a prisoner in a condemned cell . There was but one visitor who came often to the cottage , and that was Sir Reginald Eversleigh . The young baronet contrived to exist , somehow or other , upon his income of five hundred a year ; but , as he had neither abandoned his old haunts , nor put aside his old vices , the income , which to a good man would have seemed a handsome competence , barely enabled him to stave off the demands of his most pressing creditors by occasional payments on account .