midnight
The contadini had long since left their work . No one passed upon the road . There was nothing , there could have been nothing to keep a man here . She felt as if it were already midnight , the deepest hour of darkness and of silence . As she took her hands from the wall , and turned to go on up the hill to the point which commanded the open sea and the beginning of the Straits of Messina , she was terrified . Suspicion was hardening into certainty . Something dreadful must have happened to Maurice .