“I am afraid my influence is not enough to persuade her.”

“My dear boy, I am convinced that if you asked her to walk into a burning fiery furnace, she would do it to please you, without a moment’s hesitation.”

“She is that way in some things, poor dear; but in others—­I may talk till I have no voice left, and she won’t listen.  And she was set on this scheme.  She has a mania for—­for that sort of thing.  One would never believe that she was your sister.  She would hate to live like other people.  She simply loves to be a nobody.  I can’t understand it.  You try your influence with her, will you?”

“Well, order a carriage for me, and I will put on my things.”

He pressed her to allow him to escort her, which was obviously the proper thing.  When she refused again, and went off, like any nobody, alone, he returned to his chambers, leaving Rosalie to the unimportant persons whose business it was to look after her.

Mrs Breen’s house was in East Melbourne, and Deb directed the coachman to drive there first.  She remembered the fiftieth baby that was but a few days old.

“I must see how the poor child is doing,” Deb said—­not alluding to the baby.

And soon she saw again the exquisitely-kept garden—­large for that locality—­and the spacious white house almost glittering in the sun.  She had sniffed at the bourgeois villa—­she thought it bourgeois still —­but who could help admiring those windowpanes like diamonds, and that grass like velvet, and that air of perfect well-being which pervaded every inch of the place?  As the carriage entered the fine, wrought-iron gates, a flock of little Breens, attached to a perambulator, two nurses and five dogs, were coming out of it; and she stopped to accost and kiss them.  Each child was as fresh as a daisy, its hair like floss silk with careful brushing, its petticoats as dainty as its frock, its socks and boots immaculate.  There was Nannie, her godchild, shot up slim and tall from the dumpling baby that her aunt remembered, showing plainly the milky-fair, sunny-faced, wholesome woman that she was presently to become.  Deb gazed at her with aches of regret—­she had thought them for ever stifled in Claud’s all-sufficing companionship—­for her own lost motherhood, and of lesser but still poignant regret that she had not been allowed to adopt Nannie in Bob Goldsworthy’s place.  The joy of dressing and taking out a daughter of that stamp—­of having her at home with one, to make the tea, and to chat with, and to lean on!  Old Keziah came to the door—­Keziah sleek and placid, like the family she served—­delighted to welcome the distinguished traveller, but still more delighted to brag about the last Breen baby.

“A lovely boy, without spot or blemish,” said Keziah, three times over.  “And that makes eleven, and not one too many.  And Miss Rose doing fine, thank you.  I’ll go and prepare her for the surprise, so it don’t upset her.”