The curtain blew ever so slightly in the wind from the crevice of the door, and he watched it from his bed as it swelled and bulged and shrunk back as though it were longing to break away from the door altogether but had not quite courage enough. But although he was still confused and vague with the lazy bewilderment of sleep, he realised quite definitely in the back of his mind that there was some fact waiting for him until he should be clear-headed enough to recognise it. This certainty of something definite before him that had to be met and considered roused him. He did not, in the least, know what that something was that awaited him, but he tried to pull himself together. The sea receded, the beating of its waves was very faint in his ears, and the rocks resolved into the shining glass of the dressing-table and the solemn chairs with their backs set resolutely against the wall, and their expressions those of self-conscious virtue. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes; he knew with absolute certainty that he should not sleep again. The light was trying to pierce the blind and little eyes of colour winked at him from the window, the silver things on the dressing-table stood out, pools of white, against the dark wood. He got out of bed, and suddenly the fact stared him in the face: it was that he was committed, irrevocably committed, to help Tony. He had, in a way, been committed before, ever since Lady Gale asked him for his help; but there had always been a chance of escaping, the possibility, indeed, of the “thing” never coming off at all. But now it was coming off, and very soon, and he had to help it to come. He had turned the whole situation over in his mind so very often, and looked at it from so very many points of view, with its absurdities and its tragedies and its moralities, that there was nothing more to be said about the actual thing at all; that was, in all conscience, concrete enough. He saw it, as he sat on the bed swinging his feet, there in front of him, as some actual personality with whom he had pledged himself in league. He had sworn to help two children to elope against everybody’s wishes—he, Maradick, of all people the most law-abiding. What had come over him? However, there it was and there was nothing more to be said about it. It wasn’t to be looked at again at all with any view of its possible difficulties and dangers, it had just to be carried through. But he knew, as he thought about it, that the issue was really much larger than the actual elopement. It was the effect on him that really mattered, the fact that he could never return to Epsom again with any hope of being able to live the life there that he had lived before. The whole circle of them would be changed by this; it was the most momentous event in all their lives.