It was a long time before John had sufficiently calmed himself down, and got the mastery of those whirling circles of ever-recurring thought which almost maddened him at first, to face the situation as it now stood. At first, and for a long time, it appeared to him that ruin as complete as it was undeserved had overwhelmed him; his good fame seemed to be gone, and the bitterness of the thought that people who knew him, and knew him so well, and who had years of experience of his integrity and faithful service, should have at once believed him guilty of such treachery, seemed to drown him in a hopeless flood; for how should he convince strangers of his honour if they had no faith in it? or how attempt to clear himself professionally when two of the chief authorities in his profession believed him to have behaved so? Would it be the best way, the only way, to shake the dust from off his feet and rush away to the end of the world where a man could work, if it were the roughest navvy work, and be free from false accusation and the horror of seeing himself falsely condemned. But, then, Elly! John plunged again deeper than ever into that blackness of darkness. He had boasted in his self-confidence of the success which was awaiting him, of the certainty of his prospects. He remembered now how Mrs. Egerton had shaken her head. And now here he stood with his success turned into failure, his confidence into despair; the people who knew him best refusing to hear him. He had no fear that Elly would refuse to hear him; but who else would believe? They would not, indeed, believe that he had been treacherous, or played a villain’s part, as the Barretts did; but they would think that he had mistaken his own powers, that he was not what he imagined, that his account of himself was a boy’s brag, and not a sober estimate of what he knew he could do. And how convince them, how remedy the evil? Was it possible that any remedy would ever be found?