"Lola," sputtered Mr. Wheaton, "I have spent more money on your education than both your other sisters together ever cost me; and now here comes this young fellow and tells me, as coolly as you please, that you are engaged to him, and the like nonsense. Engaged, indeed; you are not eighteen yet, and he hasn't got a cent to his name. I thought I had brought up my children to love me at least, if I cannot compel them to obedience; and if you, Lola, go off and leave me in my old age--go away from my house with a beggar--you who have been petted and spoiled; you on whom I had built the hopes of my declining years, you will never darken my doors again, but live a beggar and an outcast forever away from your parents' home." Mrs. Wheaton had approached the group, and Charlie turned to her. "It is not as a poor man that I claim your daughter for my bride; see, I am rich--worth a hundred thousand this moment," he drew a package of papers from his pocket; "and I have the ambition and the power to amass a fortune, and place your daughter where she will never miss the comforts and luxuries of her childhood's home." He stepped over to where Mr. Wheaton stood listening in incredulous silence to what the young man said. "And may I ask from where this fabulous wealth springs so suddenly?" he asked, breaking the silence. "I own to having tried my luck, against the strict advice and wish of my employers, in mining speculations. The venture has proved successful. I say nothing in extenuation of the fault--if fault I have committed--save that I wanted to offer to Lola a home which should not be too great a contrast to her father's house. Old Bingham--" "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: