'By Jove!' I thought. 'Suppose it's Agnes. What a scene!'
And trembling with expectation I opened the door. It was Mr Nixon.
Now, Mr Nixon was an old friend of the family's, a man of forty-
nine or fifty, with a reputation for shrewdness and increasing
wealth. He owned a hundred and seventy-five cottages in the town,
having bought them gradually in half-dozens, and in rows; he
collected the rents himself, and attended to the repairs himself,
and was celebrated as a good landlord, and as being almost the
only man in Bursley who had made cottage property pay. He lived
alone in Commerce Street, and, though not talkative, was usually
jolly, with one or two good stories tucked away in the corners of
his memory. He was my mother's trustee, and had morally aided her
in the troublous times before my father's early death.
'Well, young man,' cried he. 'So you're back in owd Bosley!' It
amused him to speak the dialect a little occasionally.
And he brought his burly, powerful form into the lobby.
I greeted him as jovially as I could, and then he shook hands with
my mother, neither of them speaking.
'Mr Nixon is come for supper, Philip,' said my mother.
I liked Mr Nixon, but I was not too well pleased by this
information, for I wanted to talk confidentially to my mother.
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