"Oh, Lola! don't blacken your soul with this crime—I too loaded the curse on me; I have borne it for years—and all the useless remorse, the vain, bitter regrets. Give up all you hold dear in life, but do not, do not try to find your way to happiness over the stricken form of your father!"
Lola shook like a reed in the storm, and breaking away from Charlie she knelt by her mother's side.
"Father!" she pleaded, "father, speak to me—call me your pet again—your dearest child; see me—I will never, never leave you, father, only speak to me once again."
No one heeded Charlie, and he staggered from the house, muttering between his clinched teeth:
"So they will all turn from me—and she was the first."
Hours passed ere the old man found speech and consciousness again; and the physician who had been summoned shook his head warningly. "It was a narrow escape," he said; "careful, old man, careful. What is it the Bible, or some other good book says—'let not your angry passions rise?' Who's been vexing you?"
Lola, his special favorite, whose eyes he had seen opening on the light of this world, was not present, or her ghastly face might have prevented him from asking the question.
Mrs. Wheaton was again the quiet, sad-faced woman, solicitous only for the comfort and well-doing of the man who had been to her the most indulgent of husbands. It was hard to say what was passing in her heart; perhaps the crater had long since burned out, and the silver threads running through her raven hair was the snow that had gathered on the cold ashes. For Lola there was neither rest nor sleep, and she insisted on watching through the night by her father's bedside, though assured that there was no necessity for keeping watch.
Early the next morning she went out, not clandestinely, but with a determined step and an expression in her eye than which nothing could be more sad and hopeless. She returned after many hours, and though her eyes had lost none of their dreary expression, there seemed to be some purpose written in them that could also be traced in the lines drawn since yesterday about the firmly closed mouth. Her mother, concealed by the heavy curtains drawn back from the window, watched her gloomily as she passed through the room gathering up some music that lay scattered on the piano, as though she meant never to touch its ivory keys again.
"Ah, me!" she sighed, "she is young to learn the bitter lesson: that those who have a heart must crush out its love before they can go through life in peace! Dolores—it seemed like an atonement to call her so; but would I had not given her the fatal name. God will help her to forget—as He has given me peace."