midnight
` It is not , ' Harvey assented . Only those rooms were furnished which the little family used , five or six in all ; two or three stood vacant , and served as playgrounds for the children in bad weather . Of his relatives at the top , Buncombe never spoke ; he either did not know , or viewed with indifference , the fact that Mrs. Handover served his lodger in a menial capacity . About once a month he invited three or four male friends to a set dinner , and hilarity could be heard until long after midnight . Altogether it was a strange household , and , as he walked about the streets of the neighbourhood , Harvey often wondered what abnormalities even more striking might be concealed behind the meaningless uniformity of these heavily respectable housefronts . As a lodger he was content to dwell here ; but sometimes by a freak of imagination he pictured himself a married man , imprisoned with wife and children amid these leagues of dreary , inhospitable brickwork , and a great horror fell upon him . No .