ery seldom,--not probably above once a year, on
some special occasion. He and Mr. Wharton had married sisters, but
they were quite unlike in character and had never become friends.
Mrs. Wharton had been nearly twenty years younger than her husband;
Mrs. Roby had been six or seven years younger than her sister;
and Mr. Roby was a year or two younger than his wife. The two men
therefore belonged to different periods of life, Mr. Roby at the
present time being a florid youth of forty. He had a moderate
fortune, inherited from his mother, of which he was sufficiently
careful; but he loved races, and read sporting papers; he was
addicted to hunting and billiards; he shot pigeons, and,--so Mr.
Wharton had declared calumniously more than once to an intimate
friend,--had not an H in his vocabulary. The poor man did drop an
aspirate now and again; but he knew his defect and strove hard, and
with fair average success, to overcome it. But Mr. Wharton did not
love him, and they were not friends. Perhaps neither did Mrs. Roby
love him very ardently. She was at any rate almost always willing to
leave her own house to come to the Square, and on such occasions Mr.
Roby was always willing to dine at the Nimrod, the club which it
delighted him to frequent.

Mr. Wharton, on entering his own house, met his son on the staircase.
"Do you dine at home to-day, Everett?"

"Well, sir; no, sir. I don't think I do. I think I half promised to
dine with a fellow at the club."

"Don't you think you'd make things meet more easily about the end of
the year if you dined oftener here, where you have nothing to pay,
and less frequently at the club, where you pay for everything?"

"But what I should save you would lose, sir. That's the way I look at
it."

"Then I advise you to look at it the other way, and leave me to
take care of myself. Come in here, I want to speak to you." Everett
followed his father into a dingy back parlour, which was fitted up
with book shelves and was generally called the study, but which was
gloomy and comfortless because it was seldom used. "I have had your
friend Lopez with me at my chambers to-day. I don't like your friend
Lopez."

"I am sorry for that, sir."

"He is a man as to whom I should wish to have a good deal of evidence
before I would trust him to be what he seems to be. I dare say he's
clever."

"I think he's more than clever."

"I dare say;--and well instructed in some respects."

"I believe him to be