ve Jollyman's new grocery stores.

From the very beginning, business promised well. He and his assistant
had plenty of work; there was little time for meditation; when not
serving customers, he was busy with practical details of grocerdom,
often such as he had not foreseen, matters which called for all his
energy and ingenuity. A gratifying aspect of the life was that, day by
day, he handled his returns in solid cash. Jollyman's gave no credit;
all goods had to be paid for on purchase or delivery; and to turn out
the till when the shop had closed--to make piles of silver and
mountains of copper, with a few pieces of gold beside them--put a
cheering end to the day's labour. Warburton found himself clinking
handfuls of coin, pleased with the sound. Only at the end of the first
three months, the close of the year, did he perceive that much less
than he had hoped of the cash taken could be reckoned as clear profit.
He had much to learn in the cunning of retail trade, and it was a kind
of study that went sorely against the grain with him. Happily, at
Christmas time came Norbert Franks (whom Will had decided _not_ to take
into his confidence) and paid his debt of a hundred and twenty pounds.
This set things right for the moment. Will was able to pay a
three-and-a-half per cent. dividend to his mother and sister, and to
fare ahead hopefully.

He would rather not have gone down to The Haws that Christmastide, but
feared that his failure to do so might seem strange. The needful
prevarication cost him so many pangs that he came very near to
confessing the truth; he probably would have done so, had not his
mother been ailing, and, it seemed to him, little able to bear the
shock of such a disclosure. So the honest deception went on. Will was
supposed to be managing a London branch of the Applegarth business.
Great expenditure on advertising had to account for the smallness of
the dividend at first. No one less likely than the ladies at The Haws
to make trouble in such a matter. They had what sufficed to them, and
were content with it. Thinking over this in shame-faced solitude,
Warburton felt a glow of proud thankfulness that his mother and sister
were so unlike the vulgar average of mankind--that rapacious multitude,
whom nothing animates but a chance of gain, with whom nothing weighs
but a commercial argument. A new tenderness stirred within him, and
resolutely he stamped under foot the impulses of self-esteem, of
self-indulgen