and
Lopez as a son-in-law, even though he should be a partner in Hunky
and Sons, and able to maintain a gorgeous palace at South Kensington.

"I have made inquiry."

"Well, papa?"

"I don't know anything about him. Nobody knows anything about him."

"Could you not ask himself anything you want to know? If I might see
him I would ask him."

"That would not do at all."

"It comes to this, papa, that I am to sever myself from a man to whom
I am attached, and whom you must admit that I have been allowed to
meet from day to day with no caution that his intimacy was unpleasant
to you, because he is called--Lopez."

"It isn't that at all. There are English people of that name; but he
isn't an Englishman."

"Of course, if you say so, papa, it must be so. I have told Aunt
Harriet that I consider myself to be prohibited from meeting
Mr. Lopez by what you have said; but I think, papa, you are a
little--cruel to me."

"Cruel to you!" said Mr. Wharton, almost bursting into tears.

"I am as ready to obey as a child;--but, not being a child, I think
I ought to have a reason." To this Mr. Wharton made no further
immediate answer, but pulled his hair, and shuffled his feet about,
and then escaped out of the room.

A few days afterwards his sister-in-law attacked him. "Are we to
understand, Mr. Wharton, that Emily is not to meet Mr. Lopez again?
It makes it very unpleasant, because he has been intimate at our
house."

"I never said a word about her not meeting him. Of course I do not
wish that any meeting should be contrived between them."

"As it stands now it is prejudicial to her. Of course it cannot but
be observed, and it is so odd that a young lady should be forbidden
to meet a certain man. It looks so unpleasant for her,--as though she
had misbehaved herself."

"I have never thought so for a moment."

"Of course you have not. How could you have thought so, Mr. Wharton?"

"I say that I never did."

"What must he think when he knows,--as of course he does know,--that
she has been forbidden to meet him? It must make him fancy that he is
made very much of. All that is so very bad for a girl! Indeed it is,
Mr. Wharton." Of course there was absolute dishonesty in all this on
the part of Mrs. Roby. She was true enough to Emily's lover,--too
true to him; but she was false to Emily's father. If Emily would
have yielded to her she would have arranged meetings at her own
house between the lovers altogether in oppositi