II
Nearly two years after Guy Firminger had spent that friendly hour in Mrs. Gosselin's little garden in Hampshire this farseeing woman was enabled (by the return of her son, who in New York, in an English bank, occupied a position in which they all rejoiced, to such great things might it possibly lead) to resume possession, for the season, of the little house in London which her husband had left her to live in, but which her native thrift, in determining her to let it for a term, had converted into a source of income. Hugh Gosselin, who was thirty years old, and at twenty-three, before his father's death, had been despatched to America to exert himself, was understood to be doing very well—so well that his devotion to the interests of his employers had been rewarded, for the first time, with a real holiday. He was to
