Book The First: Poverty Chapter 27 Five-and-Twenty

A frequently recurring doubt, whether Mr Pancks's desire to collect
information relative to the Dorrit family could have any possible
bearing on the misgivings he had imparted to his mother on his return
from his long exile, caused Arthur Clennam much uneasiness at this
period.

What Mr Pancks already knew about the Dorrit family, what more
he really wanted to find out, and why he should trouble his busy head
about them at all, were questions that often perplexed him. Mr Pancks
was not a man to waste his time and trouble in researches prompted by
idle curiosity.

That he had a specific object Clennam could not doubt.
And whether the attainment of that object by Mr Pancks's industry might
bring to light, in some untimely way, secret reasons which had induced
his mother to take Little Dorrit by the hand, was a serious speculation.

Not that he ever wavered either in his desire or his determination to
repair a wrong that had been done in his father's time, should a
wrong come to light, and be reparable. The shadow of a supposed act
of injustice, which had hung over him since his father's death, was
so vague and formless that it might be the result of a reality widely
remote from his idea of it. But, if his apprehensions should prove to
be well founded, he was ready at any moment to lay down all he had, and
begin the world anew. As the fierce dark teaching of his childhood had
never sunk into his heart, so that first article in his code of morals
was, that he must begin, in practical humility, with looking well to
his feet on Earth, and that he could never mount on wings of words to
Heaven.