midnight
Her appetite had much improved , but , against that , she was sleeping badly -- which she partly attributed to the `` noise '' -- and was growing , probably on account of her idle days , increasingly restless . She found it difficult to settle down to anything -- the hours in the hotel lounge after dinner , which used to be comfortably drowsy after the day of sea-air , were now a long stretch of boredom , from which she went up early to bed , knowing that she would not sleep . The band played on the parade every evening , but Joanna considered that it would be unseemly for her to go out alone in Marlingate after dark . Though she would have walked out on the Brodnyx road at midnight without putting the slightest strain on either her courage or her decorum , the well-lighted streets of a town became to her vaguely dangerous and indecorous after dusk had fallen . `` It would n't be seemly , '' she repeated to herself in the loneliness and dullness of the lounge , and went desperately to bed . However , three nights before going away she could bear it no longer . After a warm April day , a purple starry evening hung over the sea .