his daughter ought to marry no one but an English Tory. I am not
exactly that."

"A man does not hamper his daughter in these days by politics, when
she is falling in love."

"There are other cognate reasons. He does not like a foreigner. Now I
am an Englishman, but I have a foreign name. He does not think that a
name so grandly Saxon as Wharton should be changed to one so meanly
Latin as Lopez."

"The lady does not object to the Latinity?"

"I fancy not."

"Or to the bearer of it?"

"Ah;--there I must not boast. But in simple truth there is only the
father's ill-will between us."

"With plenty of money on both sides?" asked the Duchess. Lopez
shrugged his shoulders. A shrug at such a time may mean anything,
but the Duchess took this shrug as signifying that the question was
so surely settled as to admit of no difficulty. "Then," said the
Duchess, "the old gentleman may as well give way at once. Of course
his daughter will be too many for him." In this way the Duchess of
Omnium became the fast friend of Ferdinand Lopez.

CHAPTER XXII

St. James's Park

Towards the end of September Everett Wharton and Ferdinand Lopez were
in town together, and as no one else was in town,--so at least they
both professed to say,--they saw a good deal of each other. Lopez,
as we know, had spent a portion of the preceding month at Gatherum
Castle, and had made good use of his time, but Everett Wharton had
been less fortunate. He had been a little cross with his father, and
perhaps a little cross with all the Whartons generally, who did not,
he thought, make quite enough of him. In the event of "anything
happening" to that ne'er-do-well nephew, he himself would be the
heir; and he reflected not unfrequently that something very probably
might happen to the nephew. He did not often see this particular
cousin, but he always heard of him as being drunk, overwhelmed with
debt and difficulty, and altogether in that position of life in
which it is probable that something will "happen." There was always
of course the danger that the young man might marry and have a
child;--but in the meantime surely he, Everett Wharton, should have
been as much thought of on the banks of the Wye as Arthur Fletcher.
He had been asked down to Wharton Hall,--but he had been asked in a
way which he had not thought to be flattering and had declined to go.
Then there had been a plan for joining Arthur Fletcher in a certain
shooting, but that had fa