Read "The Red Thumbmark" by R. Austin Freeman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The morning of the trial, so long looked forward to, had at length arrived, and the train of events which it has been my business to chronicle in this narrative was now fast drawing to an end. To me those events had been in many ways of the deepest moment. Not only had they transported me from a life of monotonous drudgery into one charged with novelty and dramatic interest; not only had they introduced me to a renaissance of scientific culture and revived under new conditions my intimacy with the comrade of my student days; but, far more momentous than any of these, they had given me the vision -- all too fleeting -- of happiness untold, with the reality of sorrow and bitter regret that promised to be all too enduring.
Whence it happened that on this morning my thoughts were tinged with a certain greyness. A chapter in my life that had been both bitter and sweet was closing, and already I saw myself once more an Ishmaelite and a wanderer among strangers.