rse
arranging matters together. But I doubt whether Mr Palliser and the
Duke ever spoke on any such topic during the entire visit. Though
Mr Bott was occasionally closeted with Mr Palliser, the Duke never
troubled himself with such closetings. He went out shooting--on his
pony, read his newspaper, wrote his notes, and looked with the eye
of a connoisseur over all Mr Palliser's farming apparatus. "You seem
to have a good man, I should say," said the Duke. "What! Hubbings?
Yes;--he was a legacy from my uncle when he gave me up the Priory."
"A very good man, I should say. Of course he won't make it pay; but
he'll make it look as though it did;--which is the next best thing.
I could never get rent out of land that I farmed myself,--never." "I
suppose not," said Mr Palliser, who did not care much about it. The
Duke would have talked to him by the hour together about farming had
Mr Palliser been so minded; but he talked to him very little about
politics. Nor during the whole time of his stay at Matching did the
Duke make any other allusion to Mr Palliser's hopes as regarded
the ministry, than that in which he had told Lady Glencora at the
dinner-table that her husband's ambition was the highest by which
any man could be moved.

But Mr Bott was sometimes honoured by a few words with the Duke.

"We shall muster pretty strong, your Grace," Mr Bott had said to him
one day before dinner.

"That depends on how the changes go," said the Duke.

"I suppose there will be a change?"

"Oh yes; there'll be a change,--certainly, I should say. And it will
be in your direction."

"And in Palliser's?"

"Yes; I should think so;--that is, if it suits him. By-the-by, Mr
Bott--" Then there was a little whispered communication, in which
perhaps Mr Bott was undertaking some commission of that nature which
Lady Glencora had called "telling."

CHAPTER XXV

In Which Much of the History of the Pallisers Is Told

At the end of ten days Alice found herself quite comfortable at
Matching Priory. She had now promised to remain there till the second
week of December, at which time she was to go to Vavasor Hall,--there
to meet her father and Kate. The Pallisers were to pass their
Christmas with the Duke of Omnium in Barsetshire. "We always are
to do that," said Glencora. "It is the state occasion at Gatherum
Castle, but it only lasts for one week. Then we go somewhere else.
Oh dear!"

"Why do you say 'oh dear'?"

"Because--; I don't