four o'clock
There were accounts to be gone through . He never paid a bill without verifying every item . It was difficult to say what should be done with a farm for which a tenant could not be found even at a reduced rent . At four o'clock he came into tea , his head full of calculations of such a complex character that even his mother could not follow the different statements to his satisfaction . When she disagreed with him , he took up the `` Epistles of St Columban of Bangor , '' the `` Epistola ad Sethum , '' or the celebrated poem , `` Epistola ad Fedolium , '' written when the saint was seventy-two , and continued his reading , making copious notes in a pocket-book . To do so he drew his chair close to the library fire , and when Kitty came quickly into the room with a flutter of skirts and a sound of laughter , he awoke from contemplation , and her singing as she ascended the stairs jarred the dreams of cloister and choir which mounted from the pages to his brain in clear and intoxicating rhapsody . On the third of November Mrs Norton announced that the meet of the hounds had been fixed for the fifteenth , and that there would be a hunt breakfast .