Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. III, 1889.djvu/186

176 “Can’t answer either question, but it’s probably as well for you that to-morrow never comes.”

“Now just see how things turn out!” went on the other, in the joy of his heart. “All the thought and the trouble that I’ve gone through this last year, when I might have taken it easy and waited for chance to make me rich! Look at Kirkwood’s business. There was you and me knocking our heads together and raising lumps on them, as you may say, to find out a plan of keeping him and Jane apart, when all the while we’d nothing to do but to look on and wait, if only we’d known. Now this is what I call the working of Providence, Scawthorne. Who’s going to say, after this, that things ain’t as they should be? Everything’s for the best, my boy; I see that clearly enough.”

“Decidedly,” assented Scawthorne, with a smile. “The honest man is always rewarded in the long-run. And that reminds me; I too have had a stroke of luck.”

He went on to relate that his position in the office of Percival & Peel was now nominally that of an articled clerk, and that in three