"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 the child's pettishness; "Mr. Huntingdon has a lot of grand people to dine with him to-night. The carriages will be driving up by and by, and if you are good, you shall go into one of the best bedrooms and look at them." But Nea was not to be pacified by this; the tears ended in a fit of perverse sulking that lasted until bedtime. Nea would neither look at the carriages nor the people; the ice and fruit that had been provided as a treat were pushed angrily away; Nea would not look at the dainties--she turned her flushed face aside and buried it in her pillow. "I want papa," she sobbed, as nurse pulled down the blind and left her.