He had written his letter to Elly on the previous night. Thus everything was crammed into one day--his bad reception at the office, his discovery of the man who had thus injured him, who had injured him so much more sorely by the mere fact of existing; and the conclusion of his early romance and love-dream. He had not sent the letter yet. He had kept it open to read it in the morning, to see whether anything should be added or taken away. So many words rose to his lips which appealed involuntarily to Elly’s love, to her sympathy--and he did not want to do that. He wanted to be quite imperative about it, as a thing on which there could be no second word to say. Elly could not call a convict father. She must never even know of the man who was John’s destroyer, though he was at the same time John’s father. He shuddered at the words, notwithstanding that a great melting and softening was in his heart towards the strange, loosely-knitted intelligence which seemed to drift through everything--life, and morality, and natural affection--without feeling any one influence stronger than the other, or any moral necessity, either logical or practical. To be brought thus in all the absolutism of youth, and in all the rigid rightness of young respectability, face to face with a man to whom nothing was absolute, and the most fundamental principles were matters of argument and opinion, gave such a shock to John’s being as it is impossible to estimate. It seemed to cut him adrift from everything that kept him to his place. Had the discovery been uncomplicated by anything at the office, John might have felt it differently. It would, in any way, have taken the heart out of him, but it would not, perhaps, have interfered with his work. But now everything was gone. He flung himself down on the sofa, and lay like a man dead or disabled; like a man, he said to himself, who had been drunk overnight, who had come out of dissipation and vice with eyes that sickened at the light of day. And this was John Sandford, who never in his life before, having unbroken health and an energetic disposition and boundless determination to get on, had spent a morning in this way. He almost believed, as he threw himself down on the sofa and turned his eyes from the light, that he actually had been drunk (using the coarsest word, as if it had been of one of the navvies he was thinking) overnight.