"Why do you weep then?" returned Mrs. Trafford in her sad voice; "do you not know that there are mothers in the heart of this great city who would that their sons had never been born, or that they had seen them die in their infancy. 'He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,'" she continued to herself; then aloud, and with a strange flickering smile that scarcely lighted up the pale face, "Good-night to you--happy mother whose son perished on the Cumberland Fells, for you will soon meet him again. Good-night, Mrs. Watkins;" and with this abrupt adieu she went quickly out of the shop and was lost in the surrounding fog. "A fine figure of a woman," ejaculated Elsie, shaking her old head with a puzzled look on her wrinkled face; "a fine, grand figure of a woman, but surely an 'innocent,' neighbor?" "An innocent!" repeated Mrs. Watkins with an indignant snort; "an innocent! Mrs. Deans; why should such an idea enter your head? A shrewder and a brighter woman than my lodger, Mrs. Trafford, never breathed, though folks do say she has had a deal of trouble in her life--but there, it is none of my business; I never meddle in the affairs of my neighbors. I am not of the sort who let their tongue run away with them," finished Mrs. Watkins with a virtuous toss of her head. CHAPTER VII. NEA. She was gay, tender, petulant and susceptible. All her feelings were quick and ardent; and having never experienced contradiction or restraint, she was little practiced in self-control; nothing but the native goodness of her heart kept her from running continually into error.--WASHINGTON IRVING. If Mrs. Trafford had been questioned about her past life, she would have replied in patriarchal language that few and evil had been her days, and yet no life had ever opened with more promise than hers. Many years, nearly a quarter of a century, before the gray-haired weary woman had stood in Mrs. Watkins's shop, a young girl in a white dress, with a face as radiant as the spring morning itself, leaned over the balcony of Belgrave House to wave good-bye to her father as he rode away eastward. Those who knew Nea Huntingdon in those early days say that she was wonderfully beautiful. There was a picture of her in the Royal Academy, a dark-haired girl in a velvet dress, sitting under a marble column with a blaze of oriental scarves at her feet, and a Scotch deerhound beside her, and both face and figure were well-nigh faultless. Nea had lost her mother in her childhood, and she lived alone with her father in the great house that stood at the corner of the square, with its flower-laden balconies and many windows facing the setting sun. Nea was her father's only child, and all his hopes were centered upon her.