“All brothers! What, will you only be satisfied with an easy-chair! A charming room, and a charming fire!”
“Not so nice as a library,” said Cecil, stabbing the fire with the poker as a sort of act of possession. “We always sit in the library at Dunstone. State rooms are horrid.”
“This only wants to be littered down,” said Rosamond. “That’s my first task in fresh quarters, banishing some things and upsetting the rest, and strewing our own about judiciously. There are the inevitable wax-flowers. I have regular blarney about their being so lovely, that it would just go to my heart to expose them to the boys.”
“You have always been on the move,” said Cecil, who was standing by the table examining the ornaments.
“You may say so! there are not many of Her Majesty’s garrisons that I have not had experience of, except my native country that I wasn’t born in. It was very mean of them never once to send us to Ireland.”
“Where were you born?” said Cecil, neither of the two catching at the bull which perhaps Rosamond had allowed to escape by way of trying them.
“At Plymouth. Dick and I were both born at Plymouth, and Maurice at Scutari; then we were in the West Indies; the next two were born all up and down in Jamaica and all the rest of the Islands—Tom and Terry—dear boys, I’ve got the charge of them now they are left at school. Three more are Canadians; and little Nora is the only Irish-born one amongst us.”
“I thought you said you had never been in Ireland.”
“Never quartered there, but on visits at Rathforlane,” said Rosamond. “Our ten years at home we have been up and down the world, till at last you see I’ve ended where I began—at Plymouth.”
“Oh, what a lovely Florentine mosaic!” exclaimed Cecil, who had taken but slight interest in this itinerary. “It is just like a weight at Dunstone.” Then opening a miniature-case, “Who is this—Mrs. Poynsett when she was young?”