Love and Hatred by Marie Belloc Lowndes

It was now early, very early in the morning after the return of Lord St. Amant to the Abbey. Dead dark, and dead quiet too, in the great sleeping house. Not dead cold, however, in his lordship's comfortable bedroom, for he had built up the fire, as he sat on and on, still fully dressed, reading, or trying to read -- his bed exactly in the same state as when he had gone upstairs from the drawing-room about eleven.

It was years and years since Lord St. Amant had last stayed up all night, but though he had made a great effort to forget himself in those ever fresh, even if familiar, memoirs of Saint Simon, he had found it impossible to banish from his mind -- even for a few moments -- the awful thing which he knew would, in a sense, never leave his mind again.