“Why should you show your father’s hoards, my dear? Who has any business with them but himself?”
“No, no; it is not a hoard. It is not any thing he has saved.”
“Then it is something that he has found. He has lighted upon a treasure, I suppose. That is the reason why he has grown so fond of strolling towards the Baïkal lately. The peasants thought they were making a believer of him; but we could not understand it; though, to be sure, we might have guessed how it was that money had become so plentiful lately. He has found a fossil-bed, no doubt. Do you know where it is?”
Clara nodded, and whispered that it was she who had discovered it.
“Indeed! Well; you have done all you can do, and now you may leave it to chance to discover the matter. Meanwhile, take this basketfull of bones,—all the money I have,—and divide them equally among every body but your father. It will make his share worth less, you know, to give every body else more, and this will help to set matters straight till the secret comes out, which it will do, some day soon.”
“I wish it may,” said Clara, “and yet I dread it. Paul’s wife peeps and prys about every where; and as often as she goes towards the lake, my father frowns at me and says—‘You have told Emilia.’ But how ashamed I shall be when it comes out!—What will you do without your money when you come back? Had not I better lay it by for you, where nobody can touch it till you come to take it away yourself? In one of the caves——”
“If you do,” said Ernest, smiling, “some learned traveller will find it some hundreds of years hence, and write a book, perhaps, to describe an unaccountable deposit of fossil remains. No, Clara. When Cyprian and I have the conversation we have planned, we shall want no money; and he and the rest had better make the most of it in the meanwhile. You are a good little daughter, and I need not tell you to do what you can for your father,—whatever he desires you that you do not feel to be wrong.”
“Pumping and all,” sighed Clara.
“Pumping! I did not know we had such a grand thing as a pump among us.”
“It is in the mine,” said Clara, sadly. “The water drains in to the gallery where my father works, and he thinks I can earn something by pumping; and he says I shall be very safe beside him.”