ten in the morning
Affections so centred wreck the lives from which they are torn ; and Time , which reconciles most men to their losses , had failed to reconcile him to his . Grief slowly settled into confirmed melancholy , and melancholy into the eccentricities of which I have spoken and upon which I must now enlarge a trifle further , in order that the curiosity and subsequent action of the small group of people in whom we are interested may be fully understood and , possibly , in some degree pardoned . Judge Ostrander was , as I have certainly made you see , a recluse of the most uncompromising type ; but he was such for only half his time . From ten in the morning till five in the afternoon , he came and went like any other citizen , fulfilling his judicial duties with the same scrupulous care as formerly and with more affability . Indeed , he showed at times , and often when it was least expected , a mellowness of temper quite foreign to him in his early days . The admiration awakened by his fine appearance on the bench was never marred now by those quick and rasping tones of an easily disturbed temper which had given edge to his invective when he stood as pleader in the very court where he now presided as judge . But away from the bench , once quit of the courthouse and the town , the man who attempted to accost him on his way to his carriage or sought to waylay him at his own gate , had need of all his courage to sustain the rebuff his presumption incurred .