ption.

Day after day Tom passed through Turnbull and Marston's shop to see
Letty. Tom cared for nobody, else he would have gone in by the
kitchen-door, which was the only other entrance to the house; but I do
not know whether it is a pity or not that he did not hear the remarks
which rose like the dust of his passage behind him. In the same little
sitting-room, where for so many years Mary had listened to the slow,
tender wisdom of her father, a clever young man was now making love to
an ignorant girl, whom he did not half understand or half appreciate,
all the time he feeling himself the greater and wiser and more valuable
of the two. He was unaware, however, that he did feel so, for he had
never yet become conscious of any _fact_ concerning himself.

The whole Turnbull family, from the beginnings of things
self-constituted judges of the two Marstons, were not the less critical
of the daughter, that the father had been taken from her. There was
grumbling in the shop every time she ran up to see Letty, every one
regarding her and speaking of her as a servant neglecting her duty. Yet
all knew well enough that she was co-proprietor of business and stock,
and the elder Turnbull knew besides that, if the lawyer to whose care
William Marston had committed his daughter were at that moment to go
into the affairs of the partnership, he would find that Mary had a much
larger amount of money actually in the business than he.

Of all matters connected with the business, except those of her own
department, Mary was ignorant. Her father had never neglected his duty,
but he had so far neglected what the world calls a man's interests as
to leave his affairs much too exclusively in the hands of his partner;
he had been too much interested in life itself to look sharply after
anything less than life. He acknowledged no _worldly_ interests at all:
either God cared for his interests or he himself did not. Whether he
might not have been more attentive to the state of his affairs without
danger of deeper loss, I do not care to examine or determine; the
result of his life in the world was a grand success. Now, Mary's
feeling and judgment in regard to _things_ being identical with her
father's, Turnbull, instructed by his greed, both natural and acquired,
argued thus--unconsciously almost, but not the less argued--that what
Mary valued so little, and he valued so much, must, by necessary
deduction, be more his than hers--and _logically_ ou