ame from her. This
invasion was the direct result of his impulsive generosity. Had he only
kept his money in his pocket!

He had been forced to take the trio in and give them house-room. But he
bore the storming of his hard-won privacy with a bad grace, and Mary
had much to gloss over on her return.

She had been greatly distressed by her favourite brother's
ill-considered marriage. For, if they had not held Jinny to be John's
equal, what WAS to be said of Ned's choice? Mrs. Ned had lived among
the mining population of Castlemaine, where her father kept a
public-house; and, said Richard, her manners were accordingly: loud,
slap-dash, familiar--before she had been twenty-four hours under his
roof she was bluntly addressing him as "Mahony." There was also a
peculiar streak of touchiness in her nature ("Goes with hair of that
colour, my dear!") which rendered her extremely hard to deal with. She
had, it seemed, opposed the idea of moving to Ballarat--that was all in
her favour, said Mary--and came primed to detect a snub or a slight at
every turn. This morbid suspiciousness it was that led Mary to yield
her rights in the matter of the name: the confusion between them was
never-ending; and, at the first hint that the change would come
gracefully from her, Mrs. Ned had flown into a passion.

"It's all the same to me, Richard, what I'm called," Mary soothed him.
"And don't you think Polly was beginning to sound RATHER childish, now
I'm nearly twenty-four?"

But: "Oh, what COULD Ned have seen in her?" she sighed to herself
dismayed. For Mrs. Ned was at least ten years older than her husband;
and whatever affection might originally have existed between them was
now a thing of the past She tyrannised mercilessly over him, nagging at
him till Ned, who was nothing if not good-natured, turned sullen and
left off tossing his child in the air.

"We must just make the best of it, Richard," said Mary. "After all,
she's really fond of the baby. And when the second comes... you'll
attend her yourself, won't you, dear? I think somehow her temper may
improve when that's over."

For this was another thing: Mrs. Ned had arrived there in a condition
that raised distressing doubts in Mary as to the dates of Ned's
marriage and the birth of his first child. She did not breathe them to
Richard; for it seemed to her only to make matters of this kind worse,
openly to speak of them. She devoted herself to getting the little
family under a ro