And now, instead of that fictitious triumph which he had looked to grasp, he found himself face to face with facts so sordid and so relentless that he could hardly recognise them as facts at all. His world was tottering into ruins all about him; the clash and crisis of imminent downfall and disgrace was stunning him and shaking him through and through; and in the wild tumult and confusion all the limitations of his nature seemed to break up, as it were, into one blind chaos of protest and repudiation, dominated only by despair. Nothing fixed or steadfast held its place. The very passions by which he had been driven on had been borne down and numbed. The thought of Clemence had become merely a vague element in the confusion. Of his mother he did not think at all. Even that dark factor in his being--the perversion of his instincts as to truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty--which had asserted its grim presence with the very awakening of his character; which had dictated the first steps along the path of which he stood now at the end; was swept into solution, now, with every other element in his character. It had held its place, hitherto, side by side with the other motive powers by which his life had been regulated; dictating the lines on which those powers should work, strengthening and developing with the demands they put upon it. But it had remained the servant of a stronger passion, and as far as any power of support or guidance was concerned it had gone down in the flood. He had no perception, truly, of the moral aspect of his position, no sense of guilt or of remorse. He only knew that he was beaten, that it was all over with him. He stood there at the window staring out into the sunshine, seeing nothing, conscious of nothing but the gulf before him; as utterly and absolutely isolated in his misery as though he had been the only creature living in the world. The desperate struggle with facts was sinking into a hopeless confused acceptance of them; into a dazed, bewildered contemplation of details which seemed to rise slowly into distinctness out of the fog which hung about them; to rise and fade again without volition on his part. Details connected with the future came first, and he looked at them and understood them with stunned composure as though they stood outside him all together. Then he found himself wondering heavily as to the time that must pass before the certainty that was in himself became literal knowledge. There was no sense of any possible chance of salvation in his mind. By-and-by he became heavily and confusedly aware that another day had begun; another day through which he must carry his horrible, bewildering burden--no longer in the semi-unconsciousness of yesterday, but alive now in every fibre to its intolerable pressure.