about three o'clock in the
morning
It was very wonderful to him , this walk home under the stars in the early hours of the October morning , the peaceful forest all about them , mist rising here and there over the small clearings , and the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in the pauses of the talk . In after life he always looked back to it as something magical and impossible , something that had seemed too beautiful , too curiously beautiful , to have been quite true . And , though at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger said , it came back to him afterwards , staying with him till the end of his days , and always with a curious , haunting sense of unreality , as though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only faint and exquisite portions . But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled ; and when they reached the railway inn , somewhere about three o'clock in the morning , Harris shook the stranger 's hand gratefully , effusively , meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart , and went up to his room , thinking in a hazy , dream-like way of the words with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they left the confines of the forest -- `` And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust , how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart , and guard them with the keenest possible restraint . '' But Harris , the silk merchant , slept better than might have been expected , and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the day . And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had already taken his departure , he realised with keen regret that he had never once thought of asking his name . `` Yes , he signed the visitors ' book , '' said the girl in reply to his question .