to death over that unopened letter if it had not
been for her husband's tenderness and her baby's innocent face.

How the young mother doated on her child! To her he was a miracle, a
revelation. Nature had opened a fount of consolation in her troubles.
She would lie patiently for hours on her couch, watching her baby in
his sleep. Maurice, coming in jaded and weary from his work, would
pause on the threshold to admire the picture. He thought his wife
never looked so beautiful as when she had their boy in her arms.

And so the years passed on. Maurice worked, and struggled, and
pinched, till his face grew old and careworn, and the hard racking
cough began to make itself heard, and Nea's fine color faded, for the
children were coming fast now, and the days were growing darker and
darker.

By and by there was a baby girl, with her father's eyes, and beautiful
as a little angel; then twin boys whom Nea kissed and fondled for a
few weeks, and then laid in their little coffins; then another boy who
only lived two years; and lastly, after a long lapse of time, another
girl.

But when this one was born the end was fast approaching. Mr.
Huntingdon had been abroad for a year or two, and had just returned to
Belgrave House--so Mr. Dobson informed Nea when he dropped in one
evening on one of his brief visits--and he had brought with him a
young widowed niece and her boy.

Nea remembered her cousin Erle Huntingdon and the dark-eyed girl whom
he had married and taken with him to Naples; but she had never heard
of his death.

Doubtless her father meant to put Beatrice in her place, and make the
younger Erle his heir; and Nea sighed bitterly as she looked at her
boy playing about the room. Mr. Dobson interpreted the sight aright.

"Try again, Mrs. Trafford," he said, holding out his hand as he rose;
"humble yourself in the dust, for the sake of your children." And Nea
took his advice, but she never had any answer to her letter, and soon
after that their kind old friend, Mr. Dobson, died, and then
everything went wrong.

Maurice's employer gave up business, and his successor, a hard
grasping man, found fault with Maurice's failing health, and dismissed
him as an incompetent clerk; and this time Maurice found himself
without friends.

For a little time longer he struggled on, though broken in heart and
health.

They left their comfortable lodgings and took cheaper ones, and sold
every article of furniture that was not abso