Laravel 5.2 Eloquent ORM hasManyThrough

In my laravel 5.2 web app I have the following three tables-

users

id
username

profiles

id
user_id

profile_images

id
profile_id

To outline my scenario- a user can have one profile (one-to-one) and a profile can have many profile images (one-to-many). The models for these tables with the relevant relationship functions are-

User.php

public function profile_images(){
    $this->hasManyThrough('App\ProfileImage', 'App\Profile');
}
public function profile(){
    return $this->hasOne('App\Profile');
}

Profile.php

 public function profile_images()
{
  return $this->hasMany('App\ProfileImage');
}
public function user()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('App\User');
}

ProfileImage.php

    public function profile()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('App\Profile');
}

My Problem When I call profile_images() on the User model I only get the user data and only column names back for the profiles and profile_images. No attributes/data are returned even though I have a profile (with matching user_id to my test case) and two profile_images with matching profile_id.

Can you help? I'm assuming it's a problem with my hasManyThrough usage.

Thanks

via Chebli Mohamed