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.