'Then what about references, and so on?' proceeded the young man,
chuckling and rubbing his hands together.

The applicant was engaged. He had barely strength 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