eleven o'clock
`` Do n't be a damned fool , '' replied Bernard Clowes . So Laura went riding with Val Stafford . `` Come in , '' said Major Clowes in a rasping snarl , and Laura came into her husband 's room and stumbled over a chair . The windows were shuttered and the room was still dark at eleven o'clock of a fine June morning . Laura , irrepressibly annoyed , groped her way through a disorder of furniture , which seemed , as furniture always does in the dark , to be out of place and malevolently full of corners , and without asking leave flung down a shutter and flung up a window . In a field across the river they were cutting hay , and the dry summer smell of it breathed in , and with it the long rolling whirr of a haymaking machine and its periodical clash , most familiar of summer noises . And the June daylight lit up the gaunt body of Bernard Clowes stretched out on a water mattress , his silk jacket unbuttoned over his strong , haggard throat .