Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement. Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is heavier than before.
The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room. As the night lags tardily on--or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o'clock--they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.
Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase--the second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known world.

Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds there are none. It is so still that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness.
The servants are dismissed to bed, and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room. As the night lags on - or rather when it seems to stop altogether, between two and three o'clock - they find a restless craving on him to know about the weather. Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks around, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling and the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.
Volumnia, up in her room, is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only.
