How delightful to him would have been this welcome on his return to his office had his heart in other respects been free from care!  And as he thought of this, he remembered all Lily’s charms.  He told himself how much she excelled the noble scion of the de Courcy stock, with whom he was now destined to mate himself; how the bride he had rejected excelled the one he had chosen in grace, beauty, faith, freshness, and all feminine virtues.  If he could only wipe out the last fortnight from the facts of his existence!  But fortnights such as those are not to be wiped out,—­not even with many sorrowful years of tedious scrubbing.

And at this moment it seemed to him as though all those impediments which had frightened him when he had thought of marrying Lily Dale were withdrawn.  That which would have been terrible with seven or eight hundred a year, would have been made delightful with twelve or thirteen.  Why had his fate been so unkind to him?  Why had not this promotion come to him but one fortnight earlier?  Why had it not been declared before he had made his visit to that terrible castle?  He even said to himself that if he had positively known the fact before Pratt had seen Mr Dale, he would have sent a different message to the squire, and would have braved the anger of all the race of the de Courcys.  But in that he lied to himself, and he knew that he did so.  An earl, in his imagination, was hedged by so strong a divinity, that his treason towards Alexandrina could do no more than peep at what it would.  It had been considered but little by him, when the project first offered itself to his mind, to jilt the niece of a small rural squire; but it was not in him to jilt the daughter of a countess.

That house full of babies in St. John’s Wood appeared to him now under a very different guise from that which it wore as he sat in his room at Courcy Castle on the evening of his arrival there.  Then such an establishment had to him the flavour of a graveyard.  It was as though he were going to bury himself alive.  Now that it was out of his reach, he thought of it as a paradise upon earth.  And then he considered what sort of a paradise Lady Alexandrina would make for him.  It was astonishing how ugly was the Lady Alexandrina, how old, how graceless, how destitute of all pleasant charm, seen through the spectacles which he wore at the present moment.

During his first hour at the office he did nothing.  One or two of the younger clerks came in and congratulated him with much heartiness.  He was popular at his office, and they had got a step by his promotion.  Then he met one or two of the elder clerks, and was congratulated with much less heartiness.  “I suppose it’s all right,” said one bluff old gentleman.  “My time is gone by, I know.  I married too early to be able to wear a good coat when I was young, and I never was acquainted with any lords or lords’ families.”  The sting of this was the sharper because Crosbie had begun to feel how absolutely useless to him had been all that high interest and noble connection which he had formed.  He had really been promoted because he knew more about his work than any of the other men, and Lady de Courcy’s influential relation at the India Board had not yet even had time to write a note upon the subject.