two o'clock
The blind might comprehend . But the blind have a physical communication we had not ; touch has enchantments of its own . Every night , near midnight , I switched off the lights and waited in the chair at my writing-table , where I was accustomed to work . If she had not come by two o'clock , I learned to know she would not visit me that night . I might sleep in that certainty . A strange tryst I kept there in the dark ; listening to the flow of the waterfall from the lake , loud in that dead hour 's stillness , or hearing the soft , incessant sounds of insect life awake in trees and fields . If she came -- a drift of perfume , a movement slight as a curtain stirred by the wind , then an hour with such a companion as the ancient magician might have drawn out of the air to his nine mystic lamps .