In a silent shop, where the sugar seemed to shrink away in the casks, where the tea-chests looked hollow, where dust gathered on the counter, on the shelves, in the corners, everywhere; where all looked blasted and withered by the deadly upas tree opposite, you might have seen a haggard man who stood there day after day, waiting for customers that came not, and who from behind his shop windows drearily watched the opposite shop, always full; thriving, fattening on his ruin; or who, sadder sight to his eyes and heart, looked at the little back parlour, where on her sick bed his dying daughter lay. Mary, as her illness drew towards its close, became fanciful, she insisted on having her bed brought down to the back parlour, and would leave her door open, "in order to mind the shop," she said. If anything could hasten her father's ruin, this did it: the few customers whom he had left, gradually dropped off, scared away by that sick girl, looking at them with her eager, glittering eyes. He sat by her one evening in a sad and very bitter mood. She was ill, very ill, and for three days not a soul had crossed the threshold of his shop. His love and his ambition were passing away together from his life. "Father," querulously said Mary, "why did you shut the shop so early?" For since her illness the young girl's mind was always running on the shop. "Where's the use of leaving it open?" huskily answered Jones, "unless it's to see them all going to the two Teapots opposite." "Well, but I wish you had not," she resumed, "it looks so dull and so dark." It is very likely that to please her, Richard Jones would have gone and taken the shutters down; but for a knock at the private door. "There's Miss Gray," said Mary, her face lighting. Richard Jones went and opened it; it was Rachel Gray. The light of the candle which he held fell full on his face; Rachel was struck with its haggard expression. "You do not look well, Mr. Jones," she said.