midnight
`` While scarlet is our colour , '' cried Everly , gallantly , as Mrs. Forester and others joined the group , while the huntress exclaimed -- `` Speak , Major ; say you deny the wooing and the wooer . Black is n't our colour , so for fun we 'll pelt the robed one . '' Delrose , pushed to it and full of hate to Trevalyon , excited , and as was usual , reckless -LRB- knowing also what his plot was for this very night ; knowing , too , how that act would be canvassed at dawn ; when society ! in her chaste morning robe would look shocked at what she would wink at at midnight , and in her _ robe de chambre _ -RRB- , electrified the groups of wasps and butterflies , in their musical mur-mur and whirr-whirr , by standing up and saying , in a tone of bravado -- `` A pretty plot and well got up for a fifth-rate theatre , but not for a drawing-room in Belgravia I need scarcely say I deny the charge , the object of which is to free a man from a ` hidden wife ' to enable him to wed a new beauty with us to-night . -LRB- Sensation -RRB- . Sir Lionel Trevalyon has lately come into the possession of much gold ; the Church of Rome hath a fancy for the yellow metal ; if the woman robed as a nun be a nun , then she is only adding to the coffers of the church by speaking the words we have heard . If she even be the one-time wife of poor Colonel Clarmont , society , knowing a thing or two -LRB- excuse the slang -RRB- , will place no reliance on the story of such an one . ''