Mrs. Cramp sat for a full minute staring at Jacob, her stout hands, from which the gloves had been taken, and her white lace ruffles lying composedly on her brown gown. "Not take Tom into the business!" she repeated, in a slow, astonished tone. "Why, Jacob, what do you mean?" "_That_," said Jacob. "Tom will stay on at a good salary: I shall increase it, I dare say, every two years, or so; but he will not come into the firm." "You can't mean what you say." "I have meant it this many a year past, Mary Ann. I have never intended to take him in." "Jacob, beware! No luck ever comes of fraud." "Of what? _Fraud?_" "Yes; I say fraud. If you deprive Tom of the place that is justly his, it will be a cheat and a fraud, and nothing short of it." "You have a queer way of looking at things, Mrs. Cramp. Who has kept the practice together all these years, but me? and added to it little by little, and made it worth double what it was; ay, and more than double? It is right--_right_, mind you, Mary Ann--that my own son should succeed to it." "Who made the practice in the first place, and took you into it out of brotherly affection, and made you a full partner without your paying a farthing, and for seventeen or eighteen years was the chief prop and stay of it?" retorted Mrs. Cramp. "Why, poor Thomas; your elder brother. Who made him a promise when he was lying dying in that very parlour where your wife and children are now sitting, that Tom should take his proper place in the firm when he was of age, and his half-share with it, according to agreement? Why you. You did, Jacob Chandler." "That was all a mistake," said Jacob, shuffling his thin legs and wrists. "I will leave you," said Mrs. Cramp. "I don't care to discuss questions while you are in this frame of mind. Is this all the benefit you got from the parson's sermon this morning, and the text he gave out before it? That text: think of it a bit, brother Jacob, and perhaps you'll see your way to acting differently. Remember," she added, turning back to him for the last word, which she always had, somehow, "that cheating never prospers in the long run. It never does, Jacob; never: for where it is crafty cheating, hidden away from the sight of man, it is seen and noted by God." Her brown skirts (all the shades of a copper tea-kettle) disappeared round the corner by the mulberry-tree, leaving Jacob very angry and uncomfortable. Angry with her, uncomfortable in himself. Do what he would, he could not get that text out of his mind--and what right had she to bring it cropping up to him in that inconvenient way, he wondered, or to speak to him about such matters at all. The verse was a beautiful verse in itself; he had always thought so: but it was not pleasant to be tormented by it--and all through Mary Ann! There it was haunting his memory again! "Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right: for that shall bring a man peace at the last."