about eleven o'clock in the morning
The lamps had been alight all day , and no procession of gloomy things , advancing from whithersoever , could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness , or have appreciably increased its density . In the darkness the cold gathered , and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything , -- of desolate , solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards , of pipes that crawled like liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses , of pools thick with orange-brown mud , and vagrant bushes creaking above the grimy earth in places that children named gardens . Fog and frost had taken a strong grip , too , upon the heart of the lady of the feathers . Somewhere about eleven o'clock in the morning she had stirred wearily in her bed , had stretched out her arms to the stagnant air of the room , and crouched up on her pillow in a grotesque hump . For a while the hump remained motionless . Then Cuckoo rolled round and extended a bare thin leg to test the atmosphere . The leg was quickly withdrawn , the atmosphere having been evidently tried in the balance and found wanting .