Four o'clock in the morning
What they said to each other by the way may safely be left to the inexhaustible imagination of a gentle and sympathising reader . Their suppressed rage , their deep mortification , and their profound disgust were swept away in their overwhelming amazement , however , when they found that Mr. Rufus Van Torp , whom they had sought in Derbyshire , was in Scotland Yard before them , closeted with their Chief and explaining what an odd mistake the justice of two nations had committed in suspecting him to have been at the Metropolitan Opera-House in New York at the time of the explosion , since he had spent that very evening in Washington , in the private study of the Secretary of the Treasury , who wanted his confidential opinion on a question connected with Trusts before he went abroad . Mr. Van Torp stuck his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets and blandly insisted that the cables should be kept red-hot -- at international expense -- till the member of the Cabinet in Washington should answer corroborating the statement . Four o'clock in the morning in London was only eleven o'clock of the previous evening , Mr. Van Torp explained , and it was extremely unlikely that the Secretary of the Treasury should be in bed so early . If he was , he was certainly not asleep ; and with the facilities at the disposal of governments there was no reason why the answer should not come back in forty minutes . It was impossible to resist such simple logic . The lines were cleared for urgent official business between London and Washington , and in less than an hour the answer came back , to the effect that Mr. Rufus Van Torp 's statement was correct in every detail ; and without any interval another official message arrived , revoking the request for his extradition , which ` had been made under a most unfortunate misapprehension , due to the fact that Mr. Van Torp 's visit to the Secretary of the Treasury had been regarded as confidential by the latter . '