CHAPTER XV.
UP IN LONDON.
[Illustration] Some kind and attentive reader may perhaps remember that Miss Grace Crawley, in a letter written by her to her friend Miss Lily Dale, said a word or two of a certain John.

"If it can only be as John wishes it!" And the same reader, if there be one so kind and attentive, may also remember that Miss Lily Dale had declared, in reply, that "about that other subject she would rather say nothing,"-- and then she had added, "When one thinks of going beyond friendship,--even if one tries to do so,--there are so many barriers!" From which words the kind and attentive reader, if such reader be in such matters intelligent as well as kind and attentive, may have learned a great deal with reference to Miss Lily Dale.
We will now pay a visit to the John in question,--a certain Mr.John Eames, living in London, a bachelor, as the intelligent reader will certainly have discovered, and cousin to Miss Grace Crawley.

Mr.John Eames at the time of our story was a young man, some seven or eight and twenty years of age, living in London, where he was supposed by his friends in the country to have made his mark, and to be something a little out of the common way.

But I do not know that he was very much out of the common way, except in the fact that he had had some few thousand pounds left him by an old nobleman, who had been in no way related to him, but who had regarded him with great affection, and who had died some two years since.

Before this, John Eames had not been a very poor man, as he filled the comfortable official position of private secretary to the Chief Commissioner of the Income-tax Board, and drew a salary of three hundred and fifty pounds a year from the resources of his country; but when, in addition to this source of official wealth, he became known as the undoubted possessor of a hundred and twenty-eight shares in one of the most prosperous joint-stock banks in the metropolis, which property had been left to him free of legacy duty by the lamented nobleman above named, then Mr.John Eames rose very high indeed as a young man in the estimation of those who knew him, and was supposed to be something a good deal out of the common way.