midnight
And to have been the mother of a future peer of England , to have the nursing , and sweet custody and very making of a future senator , -- would not that have been much ? And the man himself who would have been her husband was such a one that any woman might have trusted herself to him with perfect confidence . Now that he was gone she almost fancied that she did love him . Then she thought of Hugh Stanbury , sitting as he had described himself , in a little dark closet at the office of the `` D. R. , '' in a very old inky shooting-coat , with a tarnished square-cut cloth cap upon his head , with a short pipe in his mouth , writing at midnight for the next morning 's impression , this or that article according to the order of his master , `` the tallow-chandler ; '' -- for the editor of the Daily Record was a gentleman whose father happened to be a grocer in the City , and Hugh had been accustomed thus to describe the family trade . And she might certainly have had the peer , and the acres of garden , and the big house , and the senatorial honours ; whereas the tallow-chandler 's journeyman had never been so out-spoken . She told herself from moment to moment that she had done right ; that she would do the same a dozen times , if a dozen times the experiment could be repeated ; but still , still , there was the remembrance of all that she had lost . How would her mother look at her , her anxious , heavily-laden mother , when the story should be told of all that had been offered to her and all that had been refused ?