Maradick awoke to find himself on the garden seat with his head sunk on his breast and some one looking at him; in the hazy uncertainty of his waking his first thought was that it was Janet—he had scarcely recovered from his dream. He soon saw that it was not Janet, and, looking up confusedly, blushed on finding that it was Alice Du Cane. She was dressed in white, in something that clung about her and seemed to be made all in one piece. It looked to him very beautiful, and the great sweeping dark hat that she wore must have been delightfully shady, but it only had the effect of confusing him still more. He knew Alice Du Cane very slightly, in fact he couldn’t really be said to know her at all. They said “good morning” and “good evening,” and it had occasionally happened that they had had to talk “just to keep the ball rolling” at some odd minute or other, but she had always given him the impression of being in quite “other worlds,” from which she might occasionally look down and smile, but into which he could never possibly be admitted. He had quite acquiesced in all of this, although he had no feeling of the kind about the rest of the party; but she belonged, he felt, to that small, mysterious body of people who, in his mind at any rate, “were the very top.” He was no snob about them, and he did not feel that they were any the better people for their high position, but he did feel that they were different. There were centuries of tradition behind them, that perhaps was really it, and there were the old houses with their lawns and picture galleries, and there were those wonderful ancestors who had ruled England from the beginning of time. He had laughed sometimes when his wife had represented to him that certain people in Epsom, alluded to in a hushed voice and mysterious nods, were really “it.” He knew so well that they were not; nothing to do with it at all. But he always recognised “it” at once when it was there. He did not recognise “it” in the Gales; there was a certain quality of rest arising from assurance of possession that they lacked, but Alice Du Cane had got “it,” most assuredly she had got “it.” He liked to watch her. She moved with so beautiful a quiet and carried herself with so sure a dignity; he admired her enormously, but had been quite prepared to keep his distance. And then suddenly he had seen that she was in love with Tony, and she was at once drawn into the vortex. She became something more than a person at whom one looked, whom one admired as a picture; she was part of the situation. He had been extremely sorry for her, and it had been her unhappiness more than anything else that had worried him about his part in the affair. But now, as he saw her there watching him with a smile and leaning ever so slightly on her parasol, of ever so delicate a pink, he was furiously embarrassed. He had been sleeping, probably with his mouth open, and she had been watching him. He jumped to his feet.