midnight
Slipping into this , he immured himself in the midnight silences , to be alone with the contending forces that tore at him . If his companion was right , and such things as this made up Romance , then , after all , the drama of life had lost none of its bewilderment . For the woman he had seen between the floating purple curtains was his own wife . Durkin 's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge himself in the muffling midnight silences , the silences of those outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain . He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment , and his cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit , or that of the wild animal sorely hurt in body . Before he could face life again , he felt , he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric of some new and factitious faith . But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist and chaos of utter bewilderment , as reason crept haltingly back to her seat , his first blind and indeterminate rage fell away from him .