noon
`` Well put ! '' was the prompt rejoinder . `` My wife and I have been toying with that riddle these twenty-four hours . Those brothers are Gideon Hayle 's sons if ever a man had sons ; that daughter is his from the ground up ; yet the two and the one are as unlike as night and noon . '' The clerks and cub pilot agreed so approvingly that the actor , lover of lines , was inspired to go on at more length . He remarked , in effect , that he had never seen so striking an instance of a parent 's natural traits growing into -- blemishes -- in one inheritor and into graces in another . Yet to know Gideon Hayle was to read the riddle .