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 thing it was for me.'
'Ah! you don't regret now all that you must have always been giving up for her,' returned Alice.
'No, indeed. Only that I did not give up more.'
'That is always the way.'
'It is indeed. One little knows the whips that a little self-will prepares.'