Lola told Charlie of the interview, and he thanked her for her devotion, and strengthened her resolution by such words as only Charlie could utter--so full of the heart's deep love and the warmth of a rich chivalrous nature. "On Christmas day, my love," he said, "I shall be able to step boldly before your father and claim you for my wife. I am all but a rich man now, thanks to old Bingham's prompting and the secrecy observed, which has left this thing entirely in our own hands. I have the field almost to myself, and shall realize within the next three months such a fortune as I had never dreamed of possessing." "Not even if that mythical uncle in the Indies had come home?" "Hang the uncle--no--I mean, I believe he is dead, poor fellow. I answered his letter last year, but never heard from him again, though he expressed the greatest longing to hear from or see some one who had ever belonged to him. It was hard to tell him that even mother, his only sister, was dead." "Poor fellow!" "Yes, mother used to say that he was heart-broken. Having come into the world myself after he left it, for the Indies, I can't well remember him; but I can feel for him now, because I know what I should do if you could not be mine. I should break into your room at night, steal you, and take you to the bottom of the sea with me." Like a romantic young lady, Lola expressed her entire willingness to visit such a place with him; and she said it so quietly that Charlie, at least, believed what she said. "Let us talk of life now, not of death," Charles went on. "If I obtain your father's consent to our union at Christmas, will you become mine on New-Year's day? I have a queer notion of wanting to celebrate my marriage--to make it a feast or hold it on a feast day. I believe that people who have determined to pass their days together should begin their new married life with the beginning of the year. Will you assist me in carrying out this romantic idea?" She called him an enthusiast, a philosopher, and a thousand other contradictory names, but the pressure of her hand gave him assurance of her consent to his wish. Christmas brought with it skies as blue and days as radiant as those for which we sing songs of glory to Italy. The rains of the season so far had fallen mostly at night, leaving the sun day by day to kiss the brown hills into fresher green, after he had freed himself from the heavy fogs of early morning.