ten o'clock
His favourite exercise was to illustrate how different everything might have been from what it was , and how the reason of the difference had always been somebody 's inability to `` see his way '' to accept the view of somebody else -- a view usually at the time discussed in strict confidence with Mr. Carteret , who surrounded his actual violation of that confidence thirty years later with many precautions against scandal . In this retrospective vein , at the head of his table , the old gentleman enjoyed a hearing , or at any rate commanded a silence , often intense . Every one left it to some one else to ask another question ; and when by chance some one else did so every one was struck with admiration at any one 's being able to say anything . Nick knew the moment when he himself would take a glass of a particular port and , surreptitiously looking at his watch , perceive it was ten o'clock . That timepiece might as well mark 1830 . All this would be a part of the suggestion of leisure that invariably descended upon him at Beauclere -- the image of a sloping shore where the tide of time broke with a ripple too faint to be a warning . But there was another admonition almost equally sure to descend upon his spirit during a stroll in a summer hour about the grand abbey ; to sink into it as the light lingered on the rough red walls and the local accent of the children sounded soft in the churchyard .