ten o'clock
Having thrust the letter under the door , David fled hastily down the stairway and into the street , where he began to pace back and forth like a sentry on his beat , never for a single instant losing sight of the window whence streamed the feeble rays of the candle from which he was to receive the signal of hope or despair . Never did a condemned felon in a cell watch for the coming of a messenger of pardon with more wildly beating heart than his as he gazed at that window up in the wall of the gloomy tenement house . Never did a mariner on a storm-tossed vessel keep his eye more resolutely fixed on beams from a distant lighthouse . It was then ten o'clock , and as he watched the slow-moving hands upon the moonlit dial in the church tower , it seemed to him they were held back by invisible fingers , and there came to his mind a forgotten story of a man who , having been accidentally imprisoned in a sepulchre , suffered in the twenty minutes which elapsed before his release all the pangs of starvation , so powerfully was his imagination excited . This story which he had once discredited he now believed , for it seemed to him as if eternities were being crowded into single moments . He had also heard that drowning men could review their entire lives in the few instants that preceded their loss of consciousness , and he acquired a new comprehension of this mystery . All the experiences of his entire existence swept through his mind again and again with a rapidity and a distinctness that astonished him .