four o'clock
He was suffering from cold feet . He felt as if he were about to succumb to the dejection which was crushing him . The reverberation of his footsteps vibrated through his brain . When he saw by his watch that it was four o'clock , he experienced , as it were , a sense of vertigo , a feeling of dismay . He tried to repeat some verses to himself , to enter on a calculation , no matter of what sort , to invent some kind of story . Impossible ! He was beset by the image of Madame Arnoux ; he felt a longing to run in order to meet her .