seven
o'clock
At the gate he paused and waved an unsteady farewell to the gambler , who stood on the porch staring after him . His interview with Evelyn Langham left North with a sense of moral nausea , yet he felt he had somehow failed in his comprehension of her , that she had not meant him to understand her as he had ; that , after all , perhaps the significance he had given to her words was of his own imagining . He waited in his room until she should have time to be well on her way home , then hurried down-stairs . He was to dine at the Herberts ' at seven o'clock , and as their place was but scant two miles from town , he determined to walk . He crossed the Square , only stopping to speak with the little lamplighter , and twenty minutes later Mount Hope , in the cold breath of the storm , had dwindled to a huddle of faint ghostly lights on the hillside and in the valley . The Herbert home , a showy country-place in a region of farms , merited a name ; but no one except Mrs. Herbert , who in the first flush of possession determined so to dignify it , had ever made use of the name she had chosen after much deliberation . General Herbert himself called it simply the farm , while to the neighbors and the dwellers in Mount Hope it was known as the general 's place , which perhaps sufficiently distinguished it ; for its owner was still always spoken of as the general , though since the war he had been governor of his state .