The next few months went dismally with John. At the bank, or away from it, there was little change in the stiff routine of his life; his few glimpses of the outside world, and particularly the memory of that hour with Sponley, made it harder to endure. His discontent steadily sank deeper and became a fact more inevitably to be reckoned with, and before the winter was over he made up his mind that he could not give up his life to the course his father had marked out for him; but he dreaded the idea of a change, and in the absence of a definite opening for him elsewhere he let events take their own course. Often he found himself wondering whether the speculator had forgotten all about his suggestion. But Sponley never forgot anything, though he often waited longer than most men are willing to. He and Harriet had not been back in town a week before they asked John to dine with them; “Just ourselves,” the note said. An invitation to dinner was not the terrible thing to John that it would have been a year before, but as the hour drew near he looked forward to it with mingled pleasure and dread. He forgot it all the moment he was fairly inside the Sponley big library. He had never seen such a room; it had a low ceiling, it was red and warm and comfortable, and there was a homely charm about the informal arrangement of the furniture. John did not see it all: he felt it, took it in with the first breath of the tobacco-savored air, while the speculator was introducing him to Mrs. Sponley, and then to some one else who stood just behind her, a fair-haired girl in a black gown. “Miss Blair is one of the family,” said Sponley; “a sort of honorary little sister of Mrs. Sponley’s.” “She’s really not much of a relation,” added Harriet, “but she’s the only one of any sort that I possess, so I have to make the most of her.” The next hours were the happiest John had ever known. It was all so new to him,--this easy, irresponsible way of taking the world, this making a luxury of conversation instead of the strict, uncomfortable necessity he had always thought it. It was pleasant fooling; not especially clever, easy to make and to hear and to forget, and so skilfully did the Sponleys do it that John never realized they were doing it at all. When the ladies rose to leave the table, Sponley detained John. “I want to talk a little business with you, if you’ll let me.