John had passed through a great many vicissitudes both of mind and situation in these past days. He had been to his own thinking independent, feeling very young and forlorn indeed, but yet with a firmness of purpose and a tenderness of feeling which had given him confidence in himself. He had felt that he would not abuse the old people’s confidence. He would make a man of himself to do them credit. He would show them honour in his keeping up of everything that had pleased them, in his return, whenever he had leisure, to the home in which their love had guarded him. That had been his first phase, and it had been full of a simple youthful dignity, and a sense of worthiness of the trust they had placed in him. And then there had come a revolution, a storm, a fierce moment of fighting and resistance to the new will, a fight which was weakened from the beginning by the fatal conviction that it must be lost. And now even the struggle was over, and he had fallen--into what had he fallen? Into a child again--into what perhaps was his natural position--the place of a boy who did not quite know what was going to be done with him, whose fate was in other hands, who had to wait and hear what was intended, where he was to be placed, with a knowledge that his own wishes had very little to do with it, and no dignity, no freedom at all! Could there be a greater downfall for a sensitive, high-spirited boy? With a certain mental elation, tempered by sorrow, he had felt himself a man though only seventeen, with all the tender ambitions of a boy, to do credit to those that loved him: now he had fallen back to the position of a child--wistfully dependent, uncertain what his fate was to be. In more ordinary circumstances even, such as happen every day, a boy who has been brought up by his grandparents, made into the son of their old age, matured by the constant company of people full of experience, and the indulgence which comes with the end of life, is apt to feel a terrible downfall when he goes back into his own family, where his parents, in their busy prime, think but little of his precocious wisdom, and do not respect at all the fictitious independence into which he has grown, and where his brothers and sisters, a rabble rout, knock him about in a way which is supposed to be very much to his advantage.