over the railings, but he would seldom
call her to him; but, strange to say, the child worshiped him.

When he rode away in the morning a beautiful little face would be
peeping at him through the geraniums on the balcony, a little dimpled
hand would wave confidingly. "Good-bye, papa," she would say in her
shrill little voice, but he never heard her; he knew nothing, and
cared little, about the lonely child-life that was lived out in the
spacious nurseries of Belgrave House.

But, thank Heaven, childhood is seldom unhappy.

Nea laughed and played with the other children in the square garden;
she drove out with her governess in the grand open carriage, where her
tiny figure seemed almost lost. Nea remembered driving with her mother
in that same carriage--a fair tired face had looked down on her
smiling.

"Mamma, is not Belgrave House the Palace Beautiful? look how its
windows are shining like gold," she had said once.

"It is not the Palace Beautiful to me, Nea," replied her mother,
quietly. Nea always remembered that sad little speech, and the tears
that had come into her mother's eyes. What did it all mean? she
wondered; why were the tears so often in her mother's eyes? why did
not papa drive with them sometimes? It was all a mystery to Nea.

Nea knew nothing about her mother's heart-loneliness and repressed
sympathies; with a child's beautiful faith she thought all fathers
were like that. When Colonel Hambleton played with his little
daughters in the square garden, Nea watched them curiously, but
without any painful comparison. "My papa is always busy, Nora," she
said, loftily, to one of the little girls who asked why Mr. Huntingdon
never came too; "he rides on his beautiful horse down to the city,
nurse says. He has his ships to look after, you know, and sometimes he
is very tired."

"Papa is never too tired to play with me and Janie," returned Nora,
with a wise nod of her head; "he says it rests him so nicely."

Somehow Nea went home not quite so happily that day; a dim
consciousness that things were different, that it never rested papa to
play with her, oppressed her childish brain; and that evening Nea
moped in her splendid nursery, and would not be consoled by her toys
or even her birds and kitten. Presently it came out with floods of
tears that Nea wanted her father--wanted him very badly indeed.

"You must not be naughty, Miss Nea," returned nurse, severely, for she
was rather out of patience with th