midday
No human being had witnessed the act , and he was cocksure that no higher power existed to see , it ; but for all that it worried him . Memories are not dead things but alive ; they dwindle in disuse , but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted . Curiously enough , though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting was accidental , as the days wore on , his memory became confused about it , until at last he was not sure -- although he assured himself that he _ was _ sure -- whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary . Then it is possible that Hill 's dietary was conducive to morbid conscientiousness ; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry , a midday bun , and , at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient , such meat as his means determined , usually in a chop-house in a back street off the Brompton Road . Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics , and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops . It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity . But apart from this influence on the feelings , there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years .