midnight
During the short space of time that elapsed before the dreaded examination week swooped down upon them , the three friends were too busy preparing for the coming ordeal to give much thought to the discovery they had made . Elfreda avoided them so persistently that there seemed small chance of getting within speaking distance . It was a week of painful suspense , broken only by brief outbursts of jubilation when some particularly formidable examination , that everyone had worried over , seemingly to the point of gray hairs , turned out better than had been expected . In the campus houses wholesale permission to burn midnight oil had been granted . Lights shone until late hours and flushed faces bent earnestly over text books as though trying to absorb their contents verbatim . On Friday , the strain , that had been lessening imperceptibly with each succeeding examination , snapped , and Overton began to think about many things that had no bearing on examinations . `` I 'm almost dead ! ''