noon
The distances turned into shadowy blue , and from blue to purple , until only a few flecks of golden light across the pearl-silver told that it was gone eternally ; that its hour was spent , for good or ill , and that Mangadone had come one evening nearer to the end of measureless Time ; but the Rev. Francis Heath did not regard its going . His face was sad with a terrible , tragic sadness that is the sadness of life and not death , and yet it was of death and not of life that he thought . A little book of George Herbert 's poems lay open before him and he had been reading it with a scholar 's love of quaint phraseology : `` I made a posy , while the days ran by ; Here will I smell my remnant out , and tie My life within this band . But Time did beckon to the flowers , and they , By noon , most cunningly did steal away , And wither 'd in my hand . '' He read the lines over and over again , and gave a deep , heart-broken sigh , bending his face between his hands , and bowing his shoulders as though under a heavy weight . His gaunt frame was thin and spare , his black alpaca coat hung on it like a sack , and his whole attitude spoke of sorrow . He might have been the presentment of an unwilling ghost , who stood with the Ferryman 's farthing under his palm , waiting to be taken across the cheerless , dark waters to a limbo of drifting souls .