intelligent as well as kind and attentive,
may have learned a great deal in 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 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. His mother, who lived in the country, was obedient
to his slightest word, never venturing to impose upon him any sign of
parental authority; and to his sister, Mary Eames, who lived with her
mother, he was almost a god upon earth. To sisters who have nothing
of their own,--not even some special god for their own individual
worship,--generous, affectionate, unmarried brothers, with sufficient
incomes, are gods upon earth.

And even up in London Mr. John Eames was somebody. He was so
especially at his office; although, indeed, it was remembered by
many a man how raw a lad he had been when he first came there, not
so very many years ago; and how they had laughed at him and played
him tricks; and how he had customarily been known to be without a
shilling for the last week before pay-day, during which period he
would borrow sixpence here and a shilling there with energy, from
men who now felt thems