her pain. When it was possible, she hid
her troubles from him, and never added to his by vain repinings and
regrets.

But in spite of Nea's courage and Maurice's patience, they had a
terribly hard life of it.

At first Maurice's efforts to find another clerkship were in vain, and
they were compelled to live on the proceeds of the check; then Nea
sold her jewels, that they might have something to fall back upon. But
presently Mr. Dobson came to their aid.

He had a large family, and could not do much, as he told them,
sorrowfully; but he found Maurice, with some trouble, a small
clerkship at eighty pounds a year, advising him at the same time to
eke out their scanty income by taking in copying work of an evening.

Indeed, as Maurice discovered many a time in his need, he did not want
a friend as long as the good manager lived.

And so those two young creatures took up the heavy burden of their
life, and carried it with tolerable patience and courage; and as in
the case of our first parents, exiled by a woman's weakness from the
fair gardens of Paradise, so, though they reaped thorns and thistles,
and earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, yet the
bitter-sweet memories of their lost Eden abode with them, and in their
poverty they tasted many an hour of pure unsullied love.

For they were young, and youth's courage is high, and the burden of
those days was not yet too hard to be borne.

Nea longed to help Maurice, but her pride, always her chief fault,
came as a stumbling-block in her way; she could not bear to go into
the world and face strangers. And Maurice on his side could not endure
the thought that his beautiful young wife should be exposed to slights
and humiliations; so Nea's fine talent wasted by misuse.

Still, even these scruples would have faded under the pressure of
severer needs, had no children come to weaken Nea's strength and keep
her drudging at home.

Nea had never seen her father nor heard anything from him all this
time. Maurice, it was true, had humbled himself again and again, but
his letters had all been returned unopened.

But when her boy was born, Nea's heart, softened by the joys of
maternity, yearned passionately for a reconciliation, and by her
husband's advice, she stifled all feelings of resentment, and wrote as
she had never written before, as she never could write again, but all
in vain; the letter was returned, and in her weakened state Nea would
have fretted herself