midnight
Thus end my excerpts from the correspondence of Mrs. Haygarthe . They are very interesting to me , as containing the vague shadow of a vanished existence ; but whether they will ever be worth setting forth in an affidavit is extremely uncertain . Doubtless that miniature of an unknown girl which caused so much consternation in the mind of sober Mrs. Rebecca was no other than the `` Molly '' whose gray eyes reminded me of Charlotte Halliday . As I copied Mrs. Rebecca 's quaint epistles , in the midnight stillness , the things of which I was writing arose before me like a picture . I could see the blue parlour that Sunday evening ; the sober couple seated primly opposite to each other ; the china monsters on the high chimneypiece ; the blue-and-white Dutch tiles , with queer squat figures of Flemish citizens on foot and on horseback ; the candles burning dimly on the spindle-legged table -- two poor pale flames reflected ghastly in the dark polished panels of the wainscot ; the big open Bible on an adjacent table ; the old silver tankard , and buckhorn-handled knives and forks set out for supper ; the solemn eight-day clock , ticking drearily in the corner ; and amid all that sombre old-fashioned comfort , gray-haired Matthew sighing and lamenting for his vanished youth . I have grown strangely romantic since I have fallen in love with Charlotte Halliday . The time was when I should have felt nothing but a flippant ignorant contempt for poor Haygarth 's feeble sighings and lamentings ; but now I think of him with a sorrowful tenderness , and am more interested in his poor commonplace life , that picture , and those two locks of hair , than in the most powerful romance that ever emanated from mortal genius .