midnight
The hollyhocks over the whitewashed fence brushed him as he passed , and the spices of the garden came to him like the essence of the eternal Romance . Over all hung Indian summer and the happy sunshine . Eugenia , rising at daybreak for a gallop across country , would feel the dew in her face and the autumn in her blood . As she dashed over fences and ditches to the unploughed pasture , the morning was as desolate as midnight -- not a soul showed in the surrounding fields and the long road lay as pallid as a streak of frost . The loneliness and the hour set her eyes to dancing and the glad blood to bounding in her veins . When a startled rabbit shied from the brushwood she would slacken her speed to watch it , and when , as sometimes chanced , she frightened a covey of partridges from their retreat , she went softly , rejoicing that no shot was near . At this time she was possessed , perhaps , of a spirit too elastic , of a buoyance almost insolent -- she turned , as it were , too round a cheek to Fate .