midnight
For it all happened a great while ago , when -- of such flimsy stuff is glory woven , -- Emilio Aguinaldo and Captain Coghlan were the persons most talked of in America ; and when the Mazet committee was `` investigating '' I forget what , but with column after column about it in the papers every day ; and when _ Me und Gott _ was a famous poem , and `` to hobsonize '' was the most popular verb ; and when I was twenty-one . _ Sic transit gloria mundi _ , as it says in the back of the dictionary . _ He Talks with Charteris _ It was upon the evening of this day , after Mr. and Mrs. Blagden had been duly rice-pelted and entrained , that I first talked against John Charteris . The novelist was , as has been said , a cousin of Peter Blagden , and as such , was one of the wedding guests at Bellemeade ; and that evening , well toward midnight , the little man , midway in the consumption of one of his interminable cigarettes , happened to come upon me seated upon the terrace and gazing , rather vacantly , in the direction of the moon . I was not thinking of anything in particular ; only there was a by-end of verse which sang itself over and over again , somewhere in the back of my brain -- `` Her eyes were the eyes of a bride whom delight makes afraid , her eyes were the eyes of a bride '' -- and so on , all over again , as at night a traveller may hear his train jogging through a monotonous and stiff-jointed song ; and in my heart there was just hunger . Charteris had heard , one may presume , of my disastrous love-business ; and with all an author 's relish of emotion , in others , chose his gambit swiftly . `` Mr. Townsend , is it not ?