"Old Bingham," interrupted Mr. Wheaton, purple in the face; "and the name of the mine?"
"The Golden Lamp," answered Charlie, proudly, holding up for Mr. Wheaton's inspection the papers he had drawn from his pocket.
"Lola!" shouted Mr. Wheaton in his shrillest tones, seizing the girl by the arm and dragging her away from Charlie's side, as if the young man had been afflicted with a sudden leprosy, "come to me, my child. He's a beggar, I tell you—a beggar and worse; for all his friends will turn from him for his indiscretion. The whole thing is a gull; there isn't gold enough in the mine to show the color. Here's the paper. Where did you have your eyes this morning?"
Charlie stood like one paralyzed; his fingers clutched tighter the roll of papers in his hand, and he gazed with a strange, bewildered stare into Lola's eyes, as though trying hard to understand what the dreadful things he heard meant. Lola seemed to comprehend quicker, and the look she bent on Charlie was full of tender pity, as she watched the lines that black, hopeless despair was writing on his face. Mrs. Wheaton had snatched the paper from her husband's hand and was reading:
"The chosen few who thought that for once they could fleece the golden lamb driven quietly into a little corner for their own benefit, have come out leaving their own wool behind. We are speaking of the Golden Lamb Mine, which was to have been paraded in the market about the first of January, to lead astray with its deceptive glitter all who were foolish enough to believe without seeing. The few shares that had already been disposed of 'to strictly confidential friends,' by the shrewd managers of the concern, have gone down from five hundred dollars to five dollars, at which figure they went begging late in the afternoon yesterday, no one having confidence in a swindle so promptly and completely exposed."
"Lola," it was Charles's voice, but so changed and broken that Mrs. Wheaton dropped the paper to look into his face.
Lola sprang to his side, and he groped for her hand as though its slender strength could uphold the man who but an hour before looked able to move mountains from their place. Blindness seemed to have fallen on his eyes, for he repeated the call when the girl stood close beside him.
"My darling," she murmured, seizing the hand that was still seeking hers, and, heedless of her mother's presence or her father's wild gestures, she pressed the icy fingers to her lips, breathing broken words of love and comfort into Charlie's ear.
"Lola!" the name again rang through the room; it was her mother's cry, and the sharp terror in it struck like a knife to the girl's heart, "your father—quick! Would you kill him? Do you not see—he is dying! Oh, my child, my child, cast off everything, but do not load your soul with his death! God help me to guide you." There was something in the woman's eye that spoke of more than alarm at the symptoms of an approaching attack, such as she had always feared for the father of her children.
She had never loved this man with the absorbing passion of which her heart was capable; but as she knelt by his side, giving him every aid in her power in a frenzied, hurried manner, so different from her usual placid ways, her wide-opened eyes seemed to look back through the shadows and mists of long, dreary years, and she spoke wildly and rapidly to her child.