one o'clock in the morning
`` Do n't _ forget _ Allman 's ! '' she enjoined him as he left the room . He was to let himself out . He was coming home late that night from the Sports Club , from a delectable evening which had lasted till one o'clock in the morning , when just as he put the large door-key into his mother 's cottage he grew aware of peculiar phenomena at the top end of Brougham Street , where it runs into St Luke 's Square . And then in the gas-lit gloom of the warm summer night he perceived a vast and vague rectangular form in the slow movement towards the slope of Brougham Street . It was a pantechnicon van . But the extraordinary thing was , not that it should be a pantechnicon van , but that if should be moving of its own accord and power .