She got on so well at the school that they wanted her to be a teacher, but she didn't like it.

Then Mr.Reckitt, the ironmonger, a friend of her father's, got her to help him with his books and bills of an evening, and when she was seventeen, because his business was growing and he hadn't much of a head for figures himself, he took her regular into the shop.

And glad she was to give up the school-teaching, for she could never abear it." "You say she had a lot of trouble ?" "Ah, that indeed she had! And all her father's fault.

But for him, foolish man, they might have been a well-to-do family.

But he's had to suffer for it himself, too.