John did not follow this train of thought. It gleamed before him as he went along, that was all; and once more he paused on the middle of the bridge, remembering how he had done so before at the different crises of his life. How he had smiled not so many days ago, on his birthday, when he passed over it and thought of his own boyish despair at seventeen, and the impulse he had felt to rush away, and cut all the ties that bound him, and go off to the ends of the world to struggle out a career for himself all alone. At twenty-one he had looked out over the same parapet, on what seemed the same outgoing sails, and had laughed to himself in high self-complacence and content at that foolish petulance of his youth. It was not yet three weeks ago--but then he had felt himself the master of his own fate with prosperity and hope in every circumstance of his life--the ball at his foot as he had said. Not three weeks ago! and now here he stood a ruined man, crushed by disgrace and humiliation, and made to appear as if in his own person he deserved that doom--the son of his father!--doing what he had always been expected to do, betraying those who trusted in him. John grasped the stony parapet and looked--oh no, with no idea of self-destruction--that was an impossible as it was a contemptible mode of escape: but with a bitter indignant persuasion that his early plan would have been the best, and that to have gone away beyond the knowledge of any who had ever heard his name--away into the unknown, fatherless, motherless, friendless--would have been after all the most expedient for him, the only wise thing to do. A convict: a convict! He went on afterwards setting his teeth, saying this to himself. It was not a thing that could be thought over calmly: his thinkings got into mere repetition to himself of these words, which seemed to circle about him like the flies in the air as he walked on. A convict! There was not the slightest reason to doubt it: it proved itself: no man but one could have held in his imagination and recollection that old innocent picture which had been John’s so long. The pretty innocent little picture that might have come out of a child’s book, with its little spice of innocent wrongness, the baby disorder, the mutinous pleasure of it! It had been sweet to his memory for years--and now all at once it became horrible, a thing his heart grew sick to think of.