Every thing seemed to prosper with him. The wines he ordered could hardly be accounted dear even at the unheard-of prices he gave for them. The beautiful creature he bought for his own riding, with just action enough to show off his handsome figure, and not sufficient to occasion him the least fatigue, appeared to be so born and bred on purpose for his use, that every eye was fixed in admiration as he paced along, and no tongue wagged to tell that while young Mowbray departed from his father's house with ten pounds in his pocket, his stepfather's ambling hack cost two hundred. Every thing seemed to prosper with him. Mrs. Simpson, instead of spoiling her fine eyes, and reducing by her secession his fair congregation of elected saints, which he had certainly good reason to fear, listened to his doctrine now with the same yielding obedience that she did before; and so far was the tongue of slander from finding any thing amiss in the frequent pastoral visits he continued to pay her, that her credit, particularly with her tradespeople, stood higher than ever, and her begging-boxes, and her tract-selling, and her albums, flourished quite as well as when she believed that she and they would ere long be translated to the Vicarage. Of Mrs. Richards's converted daughters, little Mary was the only one who ventured openly to declare that she thought the vicar had behaved extremely ill; that after what she saw pass between him and sister Louisa, it was a sin not to marry her; and that she did not think poor Mrs. Mowbray would ever be happy with a man who was so very much in love with another person. But it was only little Mary who said all this, and nobody paid much attention to it. The pious Louisa herself declared, indeed, that there never had been any thing but the purest evangelical love between them; and that the kiss about which silly Mary made such a fuss, was nothing in the world but a kiss of holy peace and brotherly love. The same eloquence which persuaded the young lady so to think, or at any rate, so to say, persuaded her likewise, and her sister Charlotte with her, to persevere in their avocations. They continued to compose tracts, to get them printed and sold when they could, and to read them aloud and give them away in manuscript when they could not. They also continued most perseveringly to expound both tracts and Scriptures for the edification of their very unhappy mother; who having passed the last twenty years of her life in exerting every faculty to render them happy around her, could not now so change her plan as to give them that portion of her house for the display of their inspired eloquence which she herself did not occupy--and thus she passed by far the greater portion of every day in listening to their ceaseless assurances that the pit of hell was yawning to receive her.