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 absolutely necessary; and the day before her baby was born, Nea, weeping bitterly, took her last relic, her mother's portrait, from the locket set with pearls from her neck, and asked Maurice to sell the little ornament.
All through that long illness, though Heaven only knows how, Maurice struggled on.