indications of ill-will. The younger apprentice, Tom Frost, was but a
boy of fifteen; he gave Cyril the idea of being a timid lad. He did
not appear to share his comrade's hostility to him, but once or
twice, when Cyril came out from the office after making up the
accounts of the day, he fancied that the boy glanced at him with an
expression of anxiety, if not of terror.

"If it were not," Cyril said to himself, "that Tom is clearly too
nervous and timid to venture upon an act of dishonesty, I should say
that he had been pilfering something; but I feel sure that he would
not attempt such a thing as that, though I am by no means certain
that Robert Ashford, with his foxy face and cross eyes, would not
steal his master's goods or any one else's did he get the chance.
Unless he were caught in the act, he could do it with impunity, for
everything here is carried on in such a free-and-easy fashion that
any amount of goods might be carried off without their being missed."

After thinking the matter over, he said, one afternoon when his
employer came in while he was occupied at the accounts,--

"I have not seen anything of a stock-book, Captain Dave. Everything
else is now straight, and balanced up to to-day. Here is the book of
goods sold, the book of goods received, and the ledger with the
accounts; but there is no stock-book such as I find in almost all the
other places where I work."

"What do I want with a stock-book?" Captain Dave asked.

"You cannot know how you stand without it," Cyril replied. "You know
how much you have paid, and how much you have received during the