eight o’clock
I should never have seen that little , ruined French village , with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees . Indeed , my life would now be , comparatively speaking , a cheerless desert , because I should never have met the most beautiful -- Well , all clouds have silver linings ; some have golden ones with rainbow edges . No ; I am not sorry I stopped at the St. Ives ; not in the least ! At any rate , there I was at eight o'clock of a Wednesday evening in a restaurant full of the usual lights and buzz and glitter , among women in soft-hued gowns , and men in their hideous substitute for the same . Across the table sat my one-time guardian , dear old Peter Dunstan , -- Dunny to me since the night when I first came to him , a very tearful , lonesome , small boy whose loneliness went away forever with his welcoming hug , -- just arrived from home in Washington to eat a farewell dinner with me and to impress upon me for the hundredth time that I had better not go . `` It 's a wild-goose chase , '' he snapped , attacking his entree savagely . Heaven knows it was to prove so , even wilder than his dreams could paint ; but if there were geese in it , myself included , there was also to be a swan .