Constance, quite a grown young lady, met her aunt on the stairs; Kathleen and Lucy rose from the piano in the drawing-room, where they had been entertaining their mother at a safe distance with their latest-learned “pieces”; they too had to be greeted and kissed—­and sweeter flesh to kiss no lips could ask for.  “My husband may be a draper,” Rose had often said, “but I’ll trouble you to show me a duke with a handsomer family.”

Mentally, Deb compared the cool, flower-petal cheeks of her Breen nieces with her Goldsworthy nephew’s mouth, covering those unpleasant teeth.  It would have been fairer to compare him with her Breen nephews, but there the contrast would have been nearly as great.  John, at business with his father, and Pennycuick, learning station management with the Simpsons at Bundaboo, had the fresh and cleanly appearance of all Rose’s children; in physical matters they were as clean as they looked.  Bob did not look unclean, but with all his excessive smartness, he looked unfresh.  That look, and the thing it meant, were his father’s legacy to him.

At last Deb reached her sister’s room.  It was another addition to the ever-growing house, and marked, like each former one, the ever-growing prosperity of the shop supporting it.  The fastidious travelled eye appraised the rich rugs and hangings, the massive “suite”, the delicately-furnished bed, and took in the general air of warm luxury and unstinted comfort, even before it fell upon Rose herself—­Rose, fat and fair, and the picture of content, sitting in the softest of arm-chairs, and the smartest of gowns and slippers, by the brightest of wood fires, with a tableful of new novels and magazines on one side of her, and a frilly cradle on the other.

“My husband may be a draper,” she had remarked at various times, “but he does give me a good home.”

Deb, so long homeless amid her wealth, conceded at this moment, without a grudge, that Rose’s humble little arrow of ambition had fairly hit the mark.

They embraced with all the warmth of the old Redford days.  A few hasty questions and answers were exchanged, and their heads met over the cradle.

“You poor child!” Deb exclaimed, as a matter of form.  “Haven’t you done with this kind of thing yet?”

“Oh,” said Rose, “I should feel lost without one now.  And we wanted another boy—­we have only three, you know.  Isn’t he a darling?”

Number eleven, fast asleep, was fished from his downy bed and laid in his aunt’s arms, eagerly extended for him.  His clothes might have been woven by fairies, and he smelt like a violet bed in spring.

Strange thrills—­sharper than those that Nannie had set going—­shook Deb’s big heart as she cuddled and kissed him.

“The older I get,” she confessed, “the greater fool I am about a baby.  And you do have such nice babies, Rose.”

“Yes,” simpered Rose.  “They are nicer than most, certainly—­I’m sure I don’t know why.”  Her eyes gloated on the white bundle; she fidgeted to get it back.  “Ah, Debbie, I wish—­I wish you knew—­”