a dividend the first year,
though the Nagasaki people were pacified with difficulty. All the
business letters came to Tom's address, and everybody who was not
directly concerned thought that he was the motive power of the
reawakened enterprise. Sometimes business people came to the mill, and
were amazed at having to confer with Mrs. Wilson, but they soon had to
respect her talents and her success. She was helped by the old clerk,
who had been promptly recalled and reinstated, and she certainly did
capitally well. She was laughed at, as she had expected to be, and
people said they should think Tom would be ashamed of himself; but it
soon appeared that he was not to blame, and what reproach was offered
was on the score of his wife's oddity. There was nothing about the mill
that she did not understand before very long, and at the end of the
second year she declared a small dividend with great pride and triumph.
And she was congratulated on her success, and every one thought of her
project in a different way from the way they had thought of it in the
beginning. She had singularly good fortune: at the end of the third year
she was making money for herself and her friends faster than most people
were, and approving letters began to come from Nagasaki. The Ashtons had
been ordered to stay in that region, and it was evident that they were
continually being obliged to entertain more instead of less. Their
children were growing fast, too, and constantly becoming more expensive.
The captain and his wife had already begun to congratulate themselves
secretly that their two sons would in all probability come into
possession, one day, of their uncle Tom's handsome property.

For a good while Tom enjoyed life, and went on his quiet way serenely.
He was anxious at first, for he thought that Mary was going to make
ducks and drakes of his money and her own. And then he did not exactly
like the looks of the thing, either; he feared that his wife was growing
successful as a business person at the risk of losing her womanliness.
But as time went on, and he found there was no fear of that, he
accepted the situation philosophically. He gave up his collection of
engravings, having become more interested in one of coins and medals,
which took up most of his leisure time. He often went to the city in
pursuit of such treasures, and gained much renown in certain quarters as
a numismatologist of great skill and experience. But at last his house
(wh