In his profession, young as he was, he had already seen something of emigration, and had contemplated it more familiarly than is usually the case. He had been in America. He knew a little of the works that were going on in various distant regions, and he had that confidence which belongs to a skilled workman in every class, that he must find employment wherever he went. Anyhow, wherever he might decide to go, the world would be a different world for him. He would be cut off from everything with which he was acquainted or which was dear to him, as much in London as at the Antipodes. Therefore, the wiser thing was to go to the Antipodes, and make life outside at once as strange as the life within. It would, perhaps, ease the horrible annihilation of every hope if everything external were changed, and he could imagine that it was Australia or New Zealand, and not some awful fate that had done it. And now henceforth he would have one companion--one poor companion from whom he could never cut himself free--his father! who would have to stand to him in place of a family, in place of Elly, over whom he would have to watch, whom he must never suffer to steal from his side, whom perhaps he might guide into some little tranquil haven, some corner of subdued and self-denying life where he might wear out in safety. But, alas! John recoiled with a thrill of natural horror, first at the circumstances, then at himself, for building upon that. His father was not old as fathers ought to be. He was not more than fifty, and, though this is old age to persons of twenty-one, the young man could not so far deceive himself as to see any signs of failing strength or life drawing towards its close in the man whom the austerity of prison life had preserved and purified, and whose eye danced with youthful elasticity still. He was not like an old father of seventy or eighty, the conventional father whom fiction allots to heroes and heroines, and who is likely to die satisfactorily at the end, at least, of a few years’ tenderness. No. May would live, it might be, as long as his son. This was an element of despair which it was impossible to strive against, and equally impossible to confess; even to his own heart John would not confess it. It lay heavily in the depths of that heart, a profound burden, like a stone at the bottom of a well.