And then, as his head grew cooler under the influence of the night air, another thought came to him. What was the little parlour-maid doing? What would happen to her, shut up all night in that house alone with that . . .? Ought he to go back? He could see her cowering, down in the basement somewhere, having heard probably the noise of the crashing lamp, terrified, waiting for Morelli to find her. Yes, he ought to go back. Then he knew that nothing, nothing in the world—no duty and no claim, no person, no power—could drive him back into that house again. He looked back on it afterwards as one of the most shameful things in his life, that he had not gone back to see what had happened to the girl; but he could not go, nothing would make him. It was not anything physical that he might have to face. If it had been ordinary normal odds—a “scrap,” as he would call it—then he would have faced it without hesitation. But there was something about that struggle upstairs that made him sick; it was something unreal, unclean, indecent. It had been abnormal, and all that there had been in it had not been the actual struggle, the blows and wounds, but something about it that must be undefined, unnamed: the “air,” the “atmosphere” of the thing, the sudden throwing down of the decent curtain that veils this world from others. But he couldn’t analyse it like that now. He only felt horribly sick at the thought of it, and his one urgent idea was to get away, far, far away, from the house and all that it contained. The night was very dark; no one would see him. He must get back to the hotel and slip up to his room and try and make himself decent. He turned slowly up the hill. Then, as his thoughts became clearer, he was conscious of a kind of exultation at its being over. So much more than the actual struggle seemed to be over; it swept away all the hazy moral fog that he had been in during the last weeks. In casting off Morelli, in flinging him from him physically as well as morally, he seemed to have flung away all that belonged to him—the wildness, the hot blood, the unrest that had come to him! He wondered whether after all Morelli had not had a great deal to do with it. There were more things in it all than he could ever hope to understand.