Book 2 Chapter 6

On one thing he was fully determined. So soon as this mystery should be solved--and he fancied a solution was no longer impossible--he would leave the place, resign the position which had become tedious, unbearably tedious in its cramped monotony, and seek some other place, in England or abroad, where he might have leisure to pursue those studies in research which had been so ruthlessly cut short by his own most unhappy miscalculation.

True, he no longer cared for fame. The possibility of some renown crowning his toil no longer danced before his eyes with alluring promises. The part of him which had craved success, recognition, the youthful, vital part of him was dead, slain by the same bullet which had ended poor Hilda Ryder's happy life; and although he was beginning to look forward to a new and less cramped career than this which now shackled him, the joyous, optimistic anticipation of youth was sadly missing.

It was impossible that once at work the old interest in his subject might awake; but now he would work for the work's sake only, for the sake of the distraction it might afford him; and though through all his troubles he had preserved, at bottom, the quick humanity which had led him to choose medicine as his career, he was thinking less now of his old ambition to find a means of alleviation for one of the greatest ills of mankind than of the zest which the renewed study of the subject might restore to his own overshadowed life.