"Aye!" replied the old man, "say it if you will."
"To the gaming-table," rejoined Quilp, "your nightly haunt. This was the precious scheme to make your fortune, was it; this was the secret certain source of wealth in which I was to have sunk my money (if I had been the fool you took me for); this was your inexhaustible mine of gold, your El Dorado, eh?"
"Yes," cried the old man, turning upon him with gleaming eyes, "it was. It is. It will be, till I die."
"That I should have been blinded," said Quilp, looking contemptuously at him, "by a mere shallow gambler!"
"I am no gambler," cried the old man, fiercely. "I call Heaven to witness that I never played for gain of mine, or love of play. It was all for her—for my little Nelly! I had sworn to leave her rich!"
"When did you first begin this mad career?" asked Quilp, his taunting inclination subdued, for a moment, by the old man's grief and wildness.
"When did I first begin?" he rejoined, passing his hand across his brow. "When was it, that I first began? When should it be, but when I began to think how little I had saved, how long a time it took to save at all, how short a time I might have, at my age, to live, and how she would be left to the rough mercies of the world with barely enough to keep her from the sorrows that wait on poverty; then it was that I began to think about it."
"Humph! the old story," said the dwarf. "You lost what money you had laid by, first, and then came to me. While I thought you were making your fortune (as you said you were) you were making yourself a beggar, eh? Dear me! And so it comes to pass that I hold every security you could scrape together, and a bill of sale upon the—upon the stock and property. But did you never win?"
"Never!" groaned the old man. "Never won back my loss!"
"I thought," sneered the dwarf, "that if a man played long enough he was sure to win at last, or, at the worst, not to come off a loser."