It would have been ridiculous to expect 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 (which had almost kept itself, and had given him little to do beside ordering the dinners, while faithful old Catherine and her niece Susan were his aids) suddenly became a great care to him.  Catherine, who had been the main-stay of the family for many years, died after a short illness, and Susan must needs choose that time, of all others, for being married to one of the second hands in the mill.  There followed a long and dismal season of experimenting, and for a time there was a procession of incapable creatures going in at one kitchen door and out of the other.  His wife would not have liked to say so, but it seemed to her that Tom was growing fussy about the house affairs, and took more notice of those minor details than he used.  She wished more than once, when she was tired, that he would not talk so much about the housekeeping; he seemed sometimes to have no other thought.