There was a trip to Niagara Falls, a sail down the St. Lawrence, a rambling about in Montreal and Quebec, a few days at the White Mountains, a week of rest in the dear old home among the Berkshire hills, and then, right in the heat of summer, when everybody was out of town, they came one night to the cozy home in Fifty-seventh street, where Susan, the maid of all work, hired in Chicopee, met them with her kindly smile, and the tea-table nicely spread stood waiting to greet them. John’s holiday was over, and he went back to his business the next morning the happiest man who rode down town either in stage, or car, or private carriage. He was married and Kitty was his wife, and he felt her kiss upon his lips and saw her as she stood looking after him with those great, sunny, blue eyes of hers, and there was a song of joy in his heart which showed itself upon his face as he entered the counting-room and took his accustomed seat at the desk. Messrs. Orr and Guile were away doing duty at Saratoga, but Mr. Steele was at home and welcomed the young man warmly, and tried to say some smart thing with regard to the business which had kept him away so long. Then John asked for Lottie, and was told that she was at Newport with a party of friends. “Confounded bores those watering-places. I can’t endure them; and Lottie told me I’d better come home, she could do very well without me,” Mr. Steele said, in a weary kind of way; and John thought of Kitty and how unwilling he should be to be separated from her now she was all his own. In the exuberance of his new happiness and because he pitied the junior partner, who must be so lonely without his wife, he invited him to dine with himself and Kitty, and Mr. Steele accepted the invitation, and was made so welcome by the pretty bride that he went again and again, and by the time autumn hung out her gay attire and Lottie came back to her home it had become a matter of course for him to dine with the Craigs as often as twice a week; and those visits, where he saw for the first time in his life, perhaps, how pleasant a home could be with love upon the hearthstone and in the atmosphere of every room, were influencing him for good and making him a softer, more demonstrative man than he had been hitherto. And when at last Lottie came early in October, he met her at the train; a very unusual thing for him to do, and kissed her so warmly that she looked at him with surprise, wondering if he had “failed” and was trying to smooth it over to her. “What is it? Has anything happened?” she asked. “No, nothing,” he answered; and, chilled with his reception and a little ashamed of having kissed his wife before everybody, when she did not care two straws for it, he sank back into his old self again, and was as silent and quiet as ever during the drive from the station to his house.