The Misses Salter had also another source of uneasiness this evening. At all times their greatest earthly apprehension, next to that of not getting husbands themselves, was, lest their father should marry, and cut them out of a small sum, which not having been swallowed up in the purchase of the estate for John, he had promised to divide between them unless indeed he married again. His doing so seemed this evening more probable than ever it had done before. The roll of his eye, while looking at Lady Flamborough, had become quite ominous, while her ladyship's air of condescension was truly alarming. "Now it would be too bad, would it not?" said Miss Salter to Miss Grace Salter, as they were undressing, "if after all, this ball that we have been so long teazing at my father to give, and that he thinks so much about the expense of, should turn out to be our own ruin in the end." "Why, I am afraid, to be sure," replied her sister, "if he marries he won't leave us the money, or else it would be a grand connection! wouldn't it? We'd be sure to be visited by every body then." "That we should, no doubt," said Miss Salter, "but what of that, we shouldn't have a shilling in the world, comparatively speaking, when my father dies--and as for John--" "He wouldn't give us a shilling if we were starving!" observed Miss Grace. By John, they meant their brother. And, by-the-by, one of the reasons, in addition to their want of beauty, why these ladies were paid so little attention to by the gentlemen, was, that it was well known, Mr. Salter had a cub of a son, on whom he meant, in imitation of his betters, to heap the earnings and savings of his life, for the purpose, as he himself expressed it, of making a family: and, for that matter he didn't see why a man mightn't be prouder of being the first of his name to do so, than if he was come of a family ready made to his hand a thousand years ago! for sure, they must all have had a beginning one time or other. But as to being the first of his name to have a rise in the world, he was not so clear of that neither: he had often heard talk of a Lord Salter or Salisbury, or something beginning with an S; and he might become a lord, one time or other, for any thing he knew to the contrary. But be that as it may, "he wasn't going to have his money, that he had been a lifetime scraping together, squandered by idle fellows that were nothing at all akin to him, but would just come and marry his daughters to get hold of the cash." "But supposing, Sir, we shouldn't get married at all," said Miss Salter one day. "Nothing more likely," replied her father. "As for Grace, she is certainly as plain a girl as I'd desire to see any day. And I don't know how it is, you're not very handsome neither, tho' you're thought so like me."