midnight
It was a strange , suggestive , hesitating manner , baffling alike to him who had more or less sounded her strange nature and to those who had no previous knowledge of her freaks and subtle intellectual power , and only reaching its height of hateful charm and mysterious daring when Frederick appeared on the scene and joined , or seemed to join , himself to the number of her examiners . Now , let all suspicion of her as an active agent in this crime be dropped , assume Frederick to be the culprit and she the simple accessory after the fact , and see how inconsistencies vanish , and how much more natural the whole conduct of this mysterious woman appears . Amabel Page left a merry dance at midnight and stole away into the Sutherland garden in her party dress and slippers -- why ? Not to fulfil an errand which anyone who knows her cold and unsympathetic nature can but regard as a pretext , but because she felt it imperative to see if her lover -LRB- with whose character , temptations , and necessities she was fully acquainted , and in whose excited and preoccupied manner she had probably discovered signs of a secretly growing purpose -RRB- meant indeed to elude his guests and slip away to town on the dangerous and unholy enterprise suggested by their mutual knowledge of the money to be obtained there by one daring enough to enter a certain house open like their own to midnight visitors . She followed at such an hour and into such a place , not an unknown man casually come upon , but her lover , whom she had tracked from the garden of his father 's house , where she had lain in wait for him . It took courage to do this , but a courage no longer beyond the limit of feminine daring , for her fate was bound up in his and she could not but feel the impulse to save him from the consequences of crime , if not from the crime itself . As for the aforementioned flower , what more natural than that Frederick should have transferred it from her hair to his buttonhole during some of their interviews at the ball , and that it should have fallen from its place to the floor in the midst of his possible struggle with Batsy ?