Beside a son, John, he had a daughter, born several years earlier, whom they christened Martha. She grew into a capricious, pretty girl, whom her father did not try to understand, particularly as he thought she never could be of the smallest importance to Bagsbury and Company. When, before she was twenty, in utter disregard of her father’s forcibly expressed objection, she married Victor Haselridge, she dropped forever out of the old man’s life. The boy, John, was too young to understand when this happened, and as his mother died soon after, he grew almost to forget that he had ever had a sister. He was very different: serious and, on the surface at least, placid. He had the old man’s lumpy head and his thin-lidded eyes, though his mouth was, like his mother’s, generous. His father had high hopes that he might, in course of years, grow to be worthy of Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank. That was the boy’s hope, too; when he was fifteen he asked to be taken from school and put to work, and his father, with ill-concealed delight, consented. Through the next five years the old man’s hopes ran higher than ever, for John showed that he knew how to work, and slowly--the tenure of office was long at Bagsbury’s--he climbed the first few rounds of the ladder. But trouble was brewing all the while, though the father was too blind to see. It began the day when the lad first set foot in a bank other than his father’s. The brightness, the bustle, the alert air that characterized every one about it, brought home to him a sharp, disappointing surprise. Try as he might, he could not bring back the old feeling of pride in Bagsbury and Company, and he felt the difference the more keenly as he grew to understand where it lay. But he liked work, and with a boy’s healthy curiosity he pried and puzzled and sought to comprehend everything, though his father out of a notion of discipline, and his fellow-employees for a less unselfish reason, discouraged his inquiries. In one way and another he made several acquaintances among the fellows of his own age who worked in the other banks, and from finding something to smile at in his queer, old-mannish way they came to like him. He had his mother’s adaptability, and he surprised them by turning out to be really good company. His deep-seated loyalty to his father and to his father’s bank made him fight down the feeling of bitterness and contempt which, nevertheless, grew stronger month by month. Everybody in that gray old vault of a bank continued to treat him as a child; there was no change anywhere, save that the mould of respectable conservatism lay thicker on old John Bagsbury, and his caution was growing into a mania.