midnight
The case is that of a woman , and I think I am doing her justice . You will be interested , I believe , to see the difference in our treatments . _ Secreta Vitæ _ -LSB- the title of one of Mr. Gosse 's poems -RSB- comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie . '' From the wonderful midnight scene between her and Archie , we may judge what we have lost in those later scenes where she was to have taxed him with the fault that was not his -- to have presently learned his innocence from the lips of his supposed victim -- to have then vindicated him to her kinsmen and fired them to the action of his rescue . The scene of the prison-breaking here planned by Stevenson would have gained interest -LRB- as will already have occurred to readers -RRB- from comparison with the two famous precedents in Scott , the Porteous mob and the breaking of Portanferry jail . The best account of Stevenson 's methods of imaginative work is in the following sentences from a letter of his own to Mr. W. Craibe Angus of Glasgow : -- `` I am still ` a slow study , ' and sit for a long while silent on my eggs . Unconscious thought , there is the only method : macerate your subject , let it boil slow , then take the lid off and look in -- and there your stuff is -- good or bad . ''