midnight
The whole aisle , it seemed , was empty , though there was still a sprinkling of folks in the north aisle , right across the great space of the nave ; and he went down the whole length , down to the west end to have a general look up the Cathedral . He stood looking for three or four minutes . Overhead hung the huge span of brickwork , lost in darkness , incredibly vast and mysterious , with here and there emerging into faint light a slice of a dome or the slope of some architrave-like dogmas from impenetrable mystery . Before him lay the immense nave , thronged now with close-packed chairs in readiness for the midnight Mass , and they seemed to him as he looked with tired eyes , almost like the bent shoulders of an enormous crowd bowed in dead silence of adoration . But there was nothing yet to adore , except up there to the left , where a very pale glimmer shone on polished marble among the shadows before the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament . There was one other exception ; for overhead , against the half-lighted apse , where a belated sacristan still moved about , himself a shadow , busy with the last preparations of the High Altar -- there burgeoned out the ominous silhouette of the vast hanging cross , but so dark that the tortured Christ upon it was invisible ... . Yet surely that was right on this night , for who , of all those who were to adore presently the Child of joy , gave a thought to the Man of Sorrows ?