Of the three little hours, None carries the darkest memory. The synoptic Gospels place the death of Christ at the ninth hour: the darkness that began at the sixth hour ends there, with the loud cry and the tearing of the temple veil, and every afternoon office since has been prayed in the knowledge of that timestamp. The early manuals make the association explicit when they commend ninth-hour prayer, and the tradition balanced the sorrow with the other ninth-hour text: in Acts, Peter and John go up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour, and heal the man lame from birth at the Beautiful Gate, so the hour of the death is also the hour of the apostolic church at prayer and of restoration.
The office's temper is accordingly sober rather than mournful, an afternoon steadiness: its old hymn asks God, the unchanging power who orders the succession of light, to grant a bright evening to a declining day, one of the most quietly beautiful of the office's prayers. Monastic custom gave None practical weight as well: in the penitential seasons the day's single meal was taken after None, which made the hour the hinge of the fasting day, and the gradual drift of that meal, and the office before it, earlier and earlier is the accepted etymology of the English noon, a word in which the ninth hour's name survives, detached from its clock, in every language of the English-speaking world.