midnight
She sat down on the sofa on which she had sat for a moment alone after her song at the dinner-party , the song murdered by Miss Filberte . The empty , brilliantly-lit rooms seemed unusually large . She glanced round them with inward-looking eyes . Here she was at midnight sitting quite alone in her own house . And she wished to do something decisive , startling as the cannon shot sometimes fired from a ship to disperse a fog wreath . That was the reason why she had told the footman to come in ten minutes . She thought that in ten minutes she might make up her mind .