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