one o'clock in the
morning before
If I could have seen any other way out of it I would not have taken this ; but I had searched everywhere in my own mind , and until this one extraordinary proposition disclosed itself I had been able to find no road at all . I set down in the document I wrote my purpose in this strange proceeding ; I signed and sealed it in an envelope , and put it in my pocket . Then I waited until the house was quite silent , and the last waiter had shuffled along the corridor . It was one o'clock in the morning before I was satisfied that the whole house had sunk to slumber , and then I marched straight to the room in which Lady Rollinson had last decisively refused to grant me a moment 's interview . I remember very well that there were three pairs of boots outside the door , that they were all new and neat and fashionable , and that I thought , as I looked at them , that in contrast with my own heavy and mud-stained footgear they looked marvellously small and delicate . I turned the handle of the door , and , to my surprise , it yielded . I found myself within a dimly-lighted room , where the main illumination was refracted in a ghostly fashion from the white ceiling , and came from the street-lamps in the square below .