"Indeed!"
"It's a stroke of wonderful luck, I consider—its falling in, just now."
"But I do not quite understand. Will someone who is taking the shop allow a good interest, do you mean?"
"Not exactly that, ma'am." He gave a sound that might have been caused by a smothered chuckle, or have been meant for a snort of contempt, and going from the table, placed himself upon the hearthrug, where he paused, making a prayer perhaps for patience to be given him to deal with this fool in her untrained, untaught folly.
"Not exactly," he went on. "I am taking the business for you to work, ma'am. Jonas Carr is an old man now, but he has lived out of the business, and brought up his children out of it, and this with only antiquated methods. With new life put into the concern, and with altogether up-to-date management, there is the making there, in my opinion—and I think I may say my opinion on such a matter is of value—of an excellent little business."
"For me to work?" Mrs. Day asked in feeble protest. "Me? A grocery business?"
"Why not?" He eyed her relentlessly, biting his finger nails. "What did you think you were going to do with the money which I have collected for you? Spend it? And collect again?"
"Not that, Mr. Boult. Certainly not that." She looked down at the black-gloved hands which lay in her lap. They trembled; to keep them steady she caught them one in the other. "I have been talking it over with my children, and we have decided, if you approve, to take a good-sized house by the sea, where we could all live together, and take in lodgers. That would be a way of making a living which would come easier to my girls and me than any other."
"Easier? Yes. The misfortune is, ma'am, that the things which are easier in the beginning are always difficult to finish up. We'll begin the other way round, if you please." He bit the nail a minute longer, looked at it, put it out of sight behind his coat tails. "Ah no; that scheme won't do at all," he said, quite pleasantly. "I know these lodgings, and the miserable women who keep them, and can only make ends meet by thieving the lodgers' mutton. The groshery line is altogether on another shelf. You and your daughters can not only make a living at it, you can make money. Make money."
Mrs. Day lifted her head, tried to capture something of her old bearing, tried to get a note of firmness into her voice. "I do not really think I could keep a shop," she said. "Above all, a grocery shop. I could not undertake it, Mr. Boult; and I am sure the girls would not like it at all; nor my son."