midnight
`` Dinner is served , '' intoned this sober personage , with a curate-like solemnity all his own . I had no wish to gape at the man , but that first glimpse of mine was a sharp one , for I knew that it was Wilkins himself that I was confronting . As I beheld him there in all the glory of his magisterial assurance I felt an involuntary and ridiculous sinking in the diaphragm . I asked myself in the name of all the Lares and Penates of Manhattan , why I had suddenly gone off on a wild-goose chase to bag an inoffensive butler about whom I had had a midnight nightmare ? Then I looked at the man more closely . He wore the conventional dress livery of twilled worsted , with an extremely high-winged collar and an extremely small lawn tie . He seemed a remarkably solid figure of a man , and his height was not insignificant .