trength to walk home; the
sudden relief from his miseries made him, for the first time, sensible
of the extreme physical weakness into which he had sunk. For the next
week he was very ill, but he did not allow this to interfere with his
new work, which was easily learnt and not burdensome.

He held this position for three years, and during that time
important things happened. When he had recovered from his state of
semi-starvation, and was living in comfort (a pound a week is a very
large sum if you have previously had to live on ten shillings), Reardon
found that the impulse to literary production awoke in him more strongly
than ever. He generally got home from the hospital about six o'clock,
and the evening was his own. In this leisure time he wrote a novel in
two volumes; one publisher refused it, but a second offered to bring it
out on the terms of half profits to the author. The book appeared, and
was well spoken of in one or two papers; but profits there were none
to divide. In the third year of his clerkship he wrote a novel in three
volumes; for this his publishers gave him twenty-five pounds, with again
a promise of half the profits after deduction of the sum advanced. Again
there was no pecuniary success. He had just got to work upon a third
book, when his grandfather at Derby died and left him four hundred
pounds.

He could not resist the temptation to recover his freedom. Four hundred
pounds, at the rate of eighty pounds a year, meant five years of
literary endeavour. In that period he could certainly determine whether
or not it was his destiny to live by the pen.

In the meantime his relations with the secretary of the hospital, Carter
by name, had grown very friendly. When Reardon began to publish books,
the high-spirited Mr Carter looked upon him with something of awe; and
when the literary man ceased to be a clerk, there was nothing to prevent
association on equal terms between him and his former employer. They
continued to see a good deal of each other, and Carter made Reardon
acquainted with certain of his friends, among whom was one John Yule,
an easy-going, selfish, semi-intellectual young man who had a place in
a Government office. The time of solitude had gone by for Reardon. He
began to develop the power that was in him.

Those two books of his were not of a kind to win popularity. They dealt
with no particular class of society (unless one makes a distinct class
of people who have brains), and