half past eight
He was almost unaware of it , it was so inconceivably gradual , so immeasurably slow . First of all the room began to fill with gray fog , and for ages and ages Ranny 's face and his wife 's face hung over him , bodiless , like pale lumps in the fog . Then for ages and for ages they were blurred , and then withdrawn from him , then blotted out . This dying , which was so eternally tedious to Mr. Ransome , lasted about twenty minutes , so that at half past eight , when Ranny should have been listening to his legal adviser , he was trying to understand what the doctor was trying to tell him about the causes , the very complicated causes of his father 's death . * * * * * And with Mr. Ransome 's death there came again on Ranny and his mother , and on all of them , the innocence and the immense delusion in which they had lived , in which they had kept it up , in the days before Ranny 's wife had run away from him and before Ranny 's enlightenment and his awful outburst . Only the innocence was ten times more persistent , the delusion ten times more solemn and more unutterably sacred now . Mr. Ransome 's death made it impossible for them to speak or think or feel about him otherwise than if he had been a good man .