noon
It was like daylight on the other side of stage scenery . They reached the great lodge gates of the park , and , to March 's surprise , passed them and continued along the interminable white , straight road . But he was himself too early for his appointment with Sir Howard , and was not disinclined to see the end of his new friend 's experiment , whatever it might be . They had long left the moorland behind them , and half the white road was gray in the great shadow of the Torwood pine forests , themselves like gray bars shuttered against the sunshine and within , amid that clear noon , manufacturing their own midnight . Soon , however , rifts began to appear in them like gleams of colored windows ; the trees thinned and fell away as the road went forward , showing the wild , irregular copses in which , as Fisher said , the house-party had been blazing away all day . And about two hundred yards farther on they came to the first turn of the road . At the corner stood a sort of decayed inn with the dingy sign of The Grapes .