midnight
Each left unuttered the actual emptiness and desolation of life , yet each nursed the bitter sting of it . Day by day he had put on a bold face , because he had long since learned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her . And , above all things , he hated to see her unhappy . Under the softly-waving palms of that midnight garden , Durkin relived their feverish past , month by remembered month , until they found the need of money staring them in the face . He reviewed each increasing dilemma , until , eventually , he had left her in her squalid Paris pension with her music pupils and the last eighty francs , while he clutched at the passing straw of an exporting house clerkship in Marseilles . The exporting house , which was under American guidance , had flickered and gone out ignominiously , and week by desperate week each new promise of honest work seemed to wither into a chimera at his feverish touch . He had been told of a demand for electrical experts at Tangier , and had promptly worked his passage to that outlandish sea-port on a Belgian coasting-steamer , only to find a week 's employment installing a burglar-alarm system in the ware-house of a Liverpool shipping company .