far beyond Russell Square, to his dingy room in Somerset House.  And Adolphus Crosbie, when very young, had been a private secretary, and had afterwards mounted up in his office to some quasi authority and senior-clerkship, bringing him in seven hundred a year, and giving him a status among assistant secretaries and the like, which even in an official point of view was something.  But the triumphs of Adolphus Crosbie had been other than these.  Not because he had been intimate with assistant secretaries, and was allowed in Whitehall a room to himself with an arm-chair, would he have been entitled to stand upon the rug at Sebright’s and speak while rich men listened,—­rich men, and men also who had handles to their names!  Adolphus Crosbie had done more than make minutes with discretion on the papers of the General Committee Office.  He had set himself down before the gates of the city of fashion, and had taken them by storm; or, perhaps, to speak with more propriety, he had picked the locks and let himself in.  In his walks of life he was somebody in London.  A man at the West End who did not know who was Adolphus Crosbie knew nothing.  I do not say that he was the intimate friend of many great men; but even great men acknowledged the acquaintance of Adolphus Crosbie, and he was to be seen in the drawing-rooms, or at any rate on the staircases, of Cabinet Ministers.

Lilian Dale, dear Lily Dale—­for my reader must know that she is to be very dear, and that my story will be nothing to him if he do not love Lily Dale—­Lilian Dale had discovered that Mr Crosbie was a swell.  But I am bound to say that Mr Crosbie did not habitually proclaim the fact in any offensive manner; nor in becoming a swell had he become altogether a bad fellow.  It was not to be expected that a man who was petted at Sebright’s should carry himself in the Allington drawing-room as would Johnny Eames, who had never been petted by any one but his mother.  And this fraction of a hero of ours had other advantages to back him, over and beyond those which fashion had given him.  He was a tall, well-looking man, with pleasant eyes and an expressive mouth,—­a man whom you would probably observe in whatever room you might meet him.  And he knew how to talk, and had in him something which justified talking.  He was no butterfly or dandy, who flew about in the world’s sun, warmed into prettiness by a sunbeam.  Crosbie had his opinion on things,—­on politics, on religion, on the philanthropic tendencies of the age, and had read something here and there as he formed his opinion.  Perhaps he might have done better in the world had he not been placed so early in life in that Whitehall public office.  There was that in him which might have earned better bread for him in an open profession.