John’s experiences were but a little more painful. The disenchantment was complete. He was shaken out of all opinion of himself. Perhaps even his feeling that his own will or way was of no importance at all exceeded reality: for he had no reason to suppose that his mother would be entirely indifferent to what he wished. She had not been unkind. She was not an emotional woman, nor given to any effusion of sympathetic feeling; but she was not unkind. But John in his downfall and dismay could not consider that. He felt himself altogether brought low. And then his position, so far as his mother was concerned, was so painful and extraordinary. She was his mother; he could not, even to himself, set up any other hope. He could not blind himself to the conviction that this was she that appeared in his childish recollections, always so silent, putting him aside, saying that the boy was not to know. But he could not call her ‘mother,’ having known her so long and seen to the depths of her character as Emily. He said ‘she’ to himself, and no more. She was the arbiter of his life. He did not think she cared at all for him, or minded whether he was happy or otherwise. Secretly, perhaps, he thought that she preferred he should not be happy; but that he knew, even while he entertained the thought, was a wrong thing to think, unkind and untrue: yet he kept it in his mind all the same. He was strolling along with his hands deeply thrust into his pockets, and despondency unspeakable in his soul, feeling that everything that made life worth living had been taken from him. He was going to the rectory to say good-bye. Good-bye was what was in his heart towards everything he looked on. Not a house he passed but was familiar to him--the shop, the post-office, even Johnson at the public-house, though the old people had so disapproved of him, and John had grown up in the idea that he was not much better than the roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour, of Scripture: they were all kind, familiar objects now. He regretted them all, worthy and unworthy. As he went along, there was some recollection associated with every bit of the road. There, Dick Spencer had thrown a snowball and hit him, and made his forehead bleed; a snowball with a stone in it--but how sorry Dick was! There he had run against Percy on the way to school and they had both come to the ground, rolling over each other. At another corner was the spot where Elly used to start to run and get before them all, with swift, light steps like a deer, scarcely touching the ground. All the boys had united in saying that it was not fair, that Elly could not stay, that the slowest of them could have beaten her in a quarter-of-a-mile; but, nevertheless, she had always got first whatever they might say. He was turning over all these old things in his heart while he strode along slowly, languidly, his whole being in pain, when suddenly, in the midst of his troubled