‘Ah, that was very different!’ Mrs. Egerton said. And in her heart Elly felt that it was different, oh, how different! So different, that even Elly herself felt with a shudder that something was before her quite other than love and happiness. There would still be love, oh, more than ever! but bitter with pain and shame. It was the afternoon when John came to them. They perceived at once, with their quick, feminine habit of reading the face and its expression, that some change had occurred since the morning. Elly rushed to meet him, when he entered, with both her eager hands held out, but John turned from her, shaking his head with sorrowful self-control. He came and sat down opposite Mrs. Egerton. And there followed a moment in which no one spoke. Mrs. Egerton lifted up her hands, and clasped them together with the natural eloquence of restrained emotion. ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘oh, my poor boy!’ Pity, tenderness, reluctance, the inexorable impossible were in her looks. It could not be, it could not be; and yet it broke her heart to say so; in such moments there is little need of words. ‘I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘I want to show you----’ He took Mr. Barrett’s paper from his pocket, and spread it out before them: the figures on it were like hieroglyphics in the women’s eyes. ‘This is what I hoped for,’ he said, ‘when I left Edgeley that day---- I don’t know how long ago, it might be a century. My great scheme, that I had all my heart in, is to be carried out. It will bring me a fortune: it is a great work, a work any man might be proud to do. I have got my foot on the ladder, sure. It is not mere hope any longer, but sure, as sure as anything that is mortal can be.’ ‘Oh, Jack!’ cried Elly, rushing to his side once more. ‘I am very glad, Jack,’ said Mrs. Egerton, with a trembling voice, ‘very glad, very glad, for you--but, oh, my poor boy----’ ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Are you glad, indeed? that’s very good of you. I’m not glad, not a bit. It doesn’t matter. I’ll work at it all the same, but I don’t care. It’s the same thing to me whether it goes on or whether it stops. You need not shake your head, for I know--I know it makes no difference. But I thought I must come and tell you. I am going to make my fortune: but it does not matter to anyone in the wide world, and I don’t care.’ ‘Jack,’ said Elly, standing by his side, ‘have you made up your mind that you will pay no attention to what I think or what I say?’ He looked at her in such a bewildering passion of misery and hopelessness that all expression seemed to have gone out of his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can’t, I can’t--even if you would.’ Then he paused, drawing a breath which was half choked by something hysterical in his throat. ‘But I had to come and tell you. It’s what we used to talk of long ago. It’s--it’s the lighthouse, Elly!’ he cried, with a sudden sob which all the manhood of twenty-one could not restrain, and buried his face in his hands.