“I will,” replied Mr Ross; “but I may as well tell you I have little chance of success, for Margaret, I suspect, would nearly as soon part with her life. Nor do I wonder at it; for the countenance of your mother as there represented seems so far above that of ordinary mortals, both in beauty and benignity, that methinks,”--and here Mr Ross smiled in his own grave way,--“if I ever felt inclined to put down six-and-eightpence against a client in place of three-and-fourpence, that look of hers would bring back my sense of honesty. You know I have Mrs Ross over the mantelpiece of my business room; and though she never approached your mother in that peculiar expression, which your father used to say to me, in a half-jocular way, humanised him into that wonderful being, a conscientious writer, yet I have been benefited in the same way by the mild light of my Agnes’s eyes.” And Mr Ross stopped, in consequence of feeling a small tendency to a thickening in the throat, which he seldom felt except when he had a cold. “And you will write Margaret, then?” resumed Martha. “That I will,” said he; “but I do not say may Heaven bless my effort, because you know Heaven has made up its mind on that and all other subjects long ago.” “Even from the foundations of the earth,” sighed Mary. “Even so,” rejoined Mr Ross as he departed, leaving the sisters to their small supper of a Newhaven haddock, each half of which was sweetened to the receiver by the consciousness that the other was being partaken of by her sister. And thereafter, having said their prayers, they retired to the same bed, to fall asleep in each other’s arms, without a regret that said arms were not a little more sinewy, or that their faces did not wear beards, and to dream of their mother.