about midnight
Hope seemed at last to have folded her wings and fled from the bright city . Some indefinable knowledge of coming catastrophe hovered over all . It was a quiet sunset that clothed sea and sky with a golden splendour as we steamed out of Fécamp harbour that evening . I walked on the deck of the trim yacht with its captain until a late hour , and looked my last on the white cliffs and headlands of the doomed land about midnight -- the hour at which the news was spreading over France , as black , swift and terrible as night itself , that hope was dead , that the whole army had been captured at Sedan , and the Emperor himself made prisoner . All this , however , we did not learn until we landed in England , although I have no doubt that John Turner knew it when he gave us so sharp a warning . The weather was favourable to us , and the ladies came on deck the next morning in a calm sea as we sped past the North Foreland between the Goodwin Lightships and the land . It was a lovely morning , and the sea all stripes of deep blue and green , and even yellow where the great sand banks of the Thames estuary lay beneath the rippled surface .