on was drawn on to tell more of his former life than ever had
been known to them. His father, a wine merchant, had died a bankrupt
when he was ten years old, and a relation, engaged in the same business
at Paris, had offered to give him a few years of foreign schooling, and
then make him useful in the business.

His excellent mother had come with him, and they had lived together on
very small means, high up in a many-storied lodging-house, while he
daily attended the Lycie. His reminiscences were very happy of those
days of cheerful contrivance, of her eager desire to make the tiny
appartement a home to her boy, of their pleasant Sundays and holidays,
and the life that in this manner was peculiarly guarded by her
influence, and the sense of being all she had upon earth. He had
scarcely ever spoken of her before, and he dwelt on her now with a
tenderness that showed how she had been the guiding spirit of his life.

At fifteen he was taken into the office at Marseilles, and she went
thither with him, but the climate did not agree with her; she drooped,
and, moreover, he discovered that the business was not conducted in the
honourable manner he had supposed. After a few months of weighing his
obligations to his kinsman against these instincts, the question was
solved by his cousin's retiring. He resolved to take his mother back
to England at any loss, and falling in with one of the partners of the
umbrella firm in quest of French silk, he was engaged as foreign
correspondent, and brought his mother to Micklethwayte, but not in time
to restore her health, and he had been left alone in the world just as
he came of age, when a small legacy came to him from his cousin, too
late for her to profit by it. It had been invested in the business, and
he had thus gradually risen to his present position. Mrs. Egremont was
amazed to hear that his mother had only been dead so short a time
before she had herself come to Micklethwayte; and fairly apologised for
the surprise she could not help betraying at finding how youthful he
had then been, and Nuttie exclaimed, in her original unguarded fashion:

'Why, Mr. Dutton, I always thought you were an old bachelor!'

'Nuttie, my dear!' said her mother in a note of warning, but Mr. Dutton
laughed and said:

'Not so far wrong! They tell me I never was a young man.'

'You had always to be everything to your mother,' said Mrs. Egremont
softly.

'Yes,' he said, 'and a very blessed thin