noon
If you will do what I ask you , be where I ask you in two hours ' time , so surely as we two stand here this minute , I will put back the German calendar by ten years at least . They drink ` To the day , ' those German Johnnies , but by to-morrow morning the English hand you are holding will have given them reason to groan over the night ! '' It was half-past eleven o'clock . Madame la Comtesse , answering a reputed call to the bedside of a dying friend , had departed early , and was not to be expected back , she said , until to-morrow noon . The servants -- given permission by the gentleman known in the house as Monsieur Gaston Merode , and who had graciously provided a huge char-à-banc for the purpose -- had gone in a body to a fair over in the neighbourhood of Sèvres , and darkness and stillness filled the long , broad corridor of the Château Larouge . Of a sudden , however , a mere thread of sound wavered through the silence , and from the direction of Miss Lorne 's room a figure in black , with feet muffled in thick , woollen stockings , padded to an angle of the passage , lifted a trap carefully hidden beneath a huge tiger-skin rug , and almost immediately Cleek 's head rose up out of the gap . `` Thank God you managed to do it .