midnight
The fire went out as he sat swinging the poker backwards and forwards . The clocks of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras struck twelve , and still Philip Sheldon pondered and plotted by that dreary hearth . The servants had retired at eleven , after a good deal of blundering with bars and shutters , and unnecessary banging of doors . That unearthly silence peculiar to houses after midnight reigned in Mr. Sheldon 's domicile , and he could hear the voices of distant roisterers , and the miauling of neighbouring cats , with a painful distinctness as he sat brooding in his silent room . The fact that a mahogany chiffonier in a corner gave utterance to a faint groan occasionally , as of some feeble creature in pain , afforded him no annoyance . He was superior to superstitious fancies , and all the rappings and scratchings of spirit-land would have failed to disturb his equanimity . He was a strictly practical man -- one of those men who are always ready , with a stump of lead-pencil and the back of a letter , to reduce everything in creation to figures .