midnight
The situation shaped itself before her with that hallucinating distinctness which belongs to the midnight vision . She knew now why Dick had suddenly reminded her of his father : had she not once before seen the same thought moving behind the same eyes ? She was sure it had occurred to Dick to use Darrow 's drawings . As she lay awake in the darkness she could hear him , long after midnight , pacing the floor overhead : she held her breath , listening to the recurring beat of his foot , which seemed that of an imprisoned spirit revolving wearily in the cage of the same thought . She felt in every fibre that a crisis in her son 's life had been reached , that the act now before him would have a determining effect on his whole future . The circumstances of her past had raised to clairvoyance her natural insight into human motive , had made of her a moral barometer responding to the faintest fluctuations of atmosphere , and years of anxious meditation had familiarized her with the form which her son 's temptations were likely to take . The peculiar misery of her situation was that she could not , except indirectly , put this intuition , this foresight , at his service .