"A bill must be a good deal longer than this is, man, before the paying it will be much of a scrape to me," said the widow, affecting to laugh. "What a fool you are, Agnes," she continued, turning to the corner of the room into which the terrified girl had crept, "what a prodigious fool, to be sure, you must be, to sit there looking as white as a sheet, because an insolent tradesman chooses to bring in a bill of a month's standing, with a posse of thief-takers to back it.... Get up, pray, and bring my desk here... I wish to write to my attorney." In obedience to this command, Agnes rose from her chair, and attempted to cross the room to fetch the desk, which was at the other extremity of it; but not all her efforts to arouse her strength sufficed to overcome the sick faintness which oppressed her. "Do, for God's sake, move a little faster, child," said Mrs. Barnaby; but Agnes failed in her habitual and meek obedience, not by falling into a chair, but by sitting down in one, conscious that her fainting at such a moment must greatly increase her aunt's embarrassment. "I'll get the desk, miss," said one of the terrible men, in a voice so nearly expressive of pity, that tears started to her own eyes in pity of herself, as she thought how wretched must be the state of one who could inspire such a feeling in such a being; but she thanked him, and he placed the lady's desk before her--that pretty little rosewood desk that had been and indeed still was the receptacle of my Lord Mucklebury's flattering if not binding effusions; and as the thought crossed the brain of Mrs. Barnaby that she had hoped to make her fortune by these same idle papers, she felt for the very first time in her life, that perhaps, after all, she had not managed her affairs quite so cleverly as she might have done. It was a disagreeable idea; but even as she conceived it her spirit rose to counteract any salutary effect such a notion might produce; and with a toss of the head that indicated defiance to her own common sense, she opened her desk with a jerk, and began editing an epistle to Mr. Magnus Morrison. But this epistle, though it reached the lawyer in a reasonably short time after it was written, was not the first he received that day, ... for the Cheltenham post had brought him the following: "DEAR BROTHER,