lgrave House to wave good-bye to her father as
he rode away eastward.

Those who knew Nea Huntingdon in those early days say that she was
wonderfully beautiful.

There was a picture of her in the Royal Academy, a dark-haired girl in
a velvet dress, sitting under a marble column with a blaze of oriental
scarves at her feet, and a Scotch deerhound beside her, and both face
and figure were well-nigh faultless. Nea had lost her mother in her
childhood, and she lived alone with her father in the great house that
stood at the corner of the square, with its flower-laden balconies and
many windows facing the setting sun.

Nea was her father's only child, and all his hopes were centered upon
her.

Mr. Huntingdon was an ambitious man; he was more, he was a profound
egotist. In his character pride, the love of power, the desire for
wealth, were evenly balanced and made subservient to a most
indomitable will. Those who knew him well said he was a hard
self-sufficient man, one who never forgot an injury or forgave it.

He had been the creator of his own fortunes; as a lad he had come to
London with the traditional shilling in his pocket, and had worked his
way to wealth, and was now one of the richest merchant princes in the
metropolis.

He had married a young heiress, and by her help had gained entrance
into society, but she had died a dissatisfied, unhappy woman, who had
never gained her husband's heart or won his confidence. In Mr.
Huntingdon's self-engrossed nature there was no room for tenderness;
he had loved his handsome young wife in a cool temperate fashion, but
she had never influenced him, never really comprehended him; his iron
will, hidden under a show of courtesy, had repressed her from the
beginning of their married life. Perhaps her chief sin in his eyes had
been that she had not given him a son; he had accepted his little
daughter ungraciously, and for the first few years of her young life
he had grievously neglected her.

No mother; left by herself in that great house, with nurses to spoil
her and servants to wait on her, the little creature grew up wayward
and self-willed; her caprices indulged, her faults and follies laughed
at or glossed over by careless governesses.

Nea very seldom saw her father in those days; society claimed him when
his business was over, and he was seldom at home. Sometimes Nea,
playing in the square garden under the acacias, would look up and see
a somber dark face watching her