"Oh, of course, and then he'll give him a stepmother, and where shall I be?" Her aunt's supreme selfishness had generally the effect of silencing Adrienne. She felt perfectly hopeless now and wisely let the subject drop. The next day was Sunday. Adrienne went off to her Protestant Service, where she met Bertha Preston. They walked back together, and Adrienne told her all that had happened. "I know you are discreet, and you know more about the child than I do. If it had not been for your brother, he would never have been found." "That is true, but my brother knew more than I did. It was all very sad. As you have guessed, my poor brother was loose in his morals and not abstemious. Nine or ten years ago, he met Carlotta Luigi in Rome. Her father was a very clever physician there. She was a great beauty and a great flirt. My brother and a dozen other men were infatuated with her. Then the Count came along. She fell headlong in love with him, and people said proposed to him. Anyhow they married when they had only known each other six weeks, and he carried her off to America with him. "It was not long before she commenced a passionate correspondence with my brother, asking him to rescue her from a cold Puritan of a husband, who had renounced both his title and his Château and wanted her to live in a country farmhouse in Virginia. My brother, I am sorry to say, encouraged her, though he had not the remotest idea of either marrying or living with her. I suppose your cousin got hold of some of his letters, and drew his own conclusions. Then she made a bolt, but brought her six weeks' old baby with her. I am afraid it was a bit of spite against her husband. She would leave him nothing. "She arrived in Rome, and the very night she arrived, my brother calmly departed, and sent word to her that he was ill, and could not see her. Another lover of hers, a young Austrian, came forward, and she went off with him. She gave her baby into the charge of a German friend of hers, and it was she who reported the child's death to its father. I think Carlotta felt reckless, and took no care of herself. She contracted a chill very soon, and fell into a rapid decline, but up to the last she refused to write to her husband. I visited her when she was left neglected and forlorn, and I wrote to her husband, but he never answered me; he thought that my brother was wholly responsible for her flight from him." "Were you living with your brother at the time?"