midnight
There were flowers on the window-sill , a young rose with opening buds , growing in a red earthen jar , and a pot of lavender just bursting into flower , with a sweet geranium beside it and some rosemary . Zorzi had planted them all for her , and her serving-woman had helped her to fasten the pots in the window , because it would have been out of the question that any man except her father should enter her room , even when she was not there . But they were Zorzi 's flowers , and she bent down and smelt their fragrance . On a table behind her a single rose hung over the edge of a tall glass with a slender stem , almost the counterpart of the one in which Contarini had drunk her health at midnight . Her father had given it to her as it came from the annealing oven , still warm after long hours of cooling with many others like it . She loved it for its grace and lightness , and as for the rose , it was the one she had made Zorzi give back to her yesterday . She meant to keep it in water till it faded , and then she would press it between the first page and the binding of her parchment missal .