A week had passed over the Teapot, and, sitting in the back-parlour with Mary, who was busy sewing, Richard Jones dived deep into his books, and cast up his accounts. He allowed for rent, for expenditure, for household, for extras, then his face, brimful of ill-disguised exultation, he said to his daughter: "Well, Mary, dear, 'taint much to boast of, but for a first week, you see, 'taint amiss, either. I find, all expenses covered, one pound ten net profit. Now, you know, that makes, first, fifty-two pound a-year; then half of fifty-two, twenty-six; add twenty-six to fifty-two, seventy-eight--seventy-eight pound a-year, net-profit. Well, it stands to reason and common sense, that as I go on, my business will go on improving too; in short, put it at the lowest--I hate exaggeration--well put it at the lowest, and I may say that by next Michaelmas, we shall have a neat hundred." "Law! father, can't you say a hundred and fifty at once," peevishly interrupted Mary. Mary's will was law. "Well, I really think I can say a hundred and fifty," ingenuously replied Richard Jones, "now, with a hundred and fifty pound for the first year, and just five per cent, as increase of profit for the second." "I'm sure it'll be ten per cent," again interrupted Mary, who, from hearing her father, had caught up some of the money terms of this money-making world. "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.