And so, as he stepped through the dim gold-dust of the evening light he was stirred with an immense sense of having stepped, definitely at last, across the threshold of new adventure and enterprise. All kinds of problems were awaiting solution--his relation to his father, his mother, his sister, his home, his past, his future, his sins and his weaknesses--and he had meant to solve them all, as he had often solved them in the past, by simply cutting adrift. But now, instead of that, he had decided to stay and face it all out, he had confessed at last that secret that he had hidden from all the world, and he had submitted to the will of a girl whom he scarcely knew and was not even sure that he liked. He stopped at that for a moment and, standing in a little pool of purple light under the benignant friendliness of a golden moon new risen and solitary, he considered it. No, he did not know whether he liked her--it was interest rather that drew him, her strangeness, her strength and loneliness, young and solitary like the moon above him--and yet--also some feeling softer than interest so that he was suddenly touched as he thought of her and spoke out aloud: "I'll be good to her--whatever happens, by God I'll be good to her," so that a chauffeur near him turned and looked with hard scornful eyes, and a girl somewhere laughed. With all his conventional dislike of being in any way "odd" he walked hurriedly on, confused and wondering more than ever what it was that had happened to him. Always before he had known his own mind--now, in everything, he seemed to be pulled two ways. It was as though some spell had been thrown over him. It was a lovely evening and he walked slowly, not wishing to enter his house too quickly. He realised that he had, during the last weeks, found nothing there but trouble. And if Maggie wished, in spite of what he had told her, to go on with him? And if his father, impatient at last, definitely asked him to stay at home altogether and insisted on an answer? And if his gradually increasing estrangement with his sister broke into open quarrel? And if, strangest of all, this religious business, that in such manifestations as the Chapel service of last night he hated with all his soul, held him after all?