‘It’s well to have the notions and the principle too,’ said the junior partner, interrupting hastily. ‘Here are some jottings I have put on paper, Sandford. You can run your eye over them. That’s what, in case your plan should be accepted, we would propose. You had better think it well over and consult your friends: and in the meantime make use of any assistance you want in the office to put it all in right form. If you will take my advice, you will lose no time.’ John looked over the paper put into his hand with a dimness in his eye and a throbbing in his head, as if all the machinery that would be wanted in the work had suddenly been set going in his brain. It clanged, and whirred, and rang as if all the great wheels were going and the pistons falling, and every motive power in action; and then there suddenly rolled out before him like a panorama the future life which he had planned and hoped, the great works in which his mind should be the directing force, and all the industries that depended thereupon. It was not, perhaps, what the youthful dreamer would ordinarily think a romantic picture. He seemed to see all the great workshops, the men in the foundries in the glare of their red furnaces, the brickworks, the regiments of excavators on the soil, a whole busy world of men, with plenty and prosperity around them. He saw all this in one lightning flash. This was what had set his imagination soberly aflame when he was a boy. This was the lighthouse that Elly had shaped among the boundless possibilities of life in Mr. Cattley’s study. Elly! Ah! that drove away his dream in a moment, and brought him back to himself, standing in a great confusion of being in Mr. Barrett’s office, studying the paper--the paper which was only half visible to him, which made fortune and favour sure. ‘I’ll take to-day,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can settle to anything to-day.’