Read it through once

Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating, flexuous domesticity. He walked about saying to himself, “What’s to be done—what’s to be done?” and by chance she overheard him. It caused her to break the reserve about their future which had hitherto prevailed.