"Well, I should not wonder if it would not," replied her docile papa. "We'll suppose it, at least; well that'd be fifteen pound to add to the hundred and fifty, or, rather, to the three hundred, and then for the next year it would be—let me see! Ah!" and he scratched his head. "I think I am getting into what they call compound interest, and, to say the truth, I never was a very quick arithmetician. At all events, it is pretty clear that at the end of ten years, we shall stand at the head of something like fifteen hundred pound, and a flourishing house of business," he added, glancing towards the shop—"a flourishing house of business," he continued, complacently passing his Angers through his hair.
Awhile he mused, then suddenly he observed: "Mary, my dear, hadn't you better go to bed?" Mary now slept at home. "You have to get up early, you know."
"Yes; but I ain't going to," she tartly replied. "It gives me a pain in my side," she added.
"Then you shall not get up early," authoritatively said Mr. Jones. "I'll not allow my daughter to work herself to death for no Miss Grays."
"I don't think I shall go at all to-morrow," composedly resumed Mary. "I don't like dress-making—it don't agree with me."
Mr. Jones had at first looked startled, but this settled the question.
"If dress-making don't agree with you, not another stitch shall you put in," he said, half angrily. "I think myself you don't look half so well as you used to, and though Miss Gray is as nice a person as one need wish to meet, I think she might have perceived it before this; but interest blinds us all—every one of us," he added, with a philosophic sigh over the weaknesses of humanity.
"I know what Jane will be sure to say," observed Mary; "but I don't care."
"I should think not! Law! bless you, child, I have got quite beyond troubling my poor brains with what other people thinks; and if I choose to keep my daughter at home now that I can afford to do so, why shouldn't I? It's a hard case, if, when a man's well off and comfortable, and getting on better and better every day—it's a hard case, indeed, if he can't keep his only child with him."
This matter decided, Mary went up to her room; her father remained by the fireside, looking at the glowing coals, and dreaming to his heart's content.