“Not at all,” returned the father; “our relation here in the bank is a purely commercial one. I cannot offer you a better position because you are not worth it to me. But if some one else has offered you a better one, you are right to take it, quite right.” And John, much relieved, though, be it said, feeling rather foolish over that incomprehensible impulse of his, again turned to the door. He went back to his desk and finished his morning’s work. Then he slipped on his overcoat, but before going out he paused to look about the big, dreary droning room. “I’ll come back here some day,” he thought, “and then--” Old Mr. Bagsbury never had but one child; that was Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank. John was not, in his mind, the heir to it, but the one who should be its guardian after he was gone; his son was no more to him than that. But that was everything; and so the old man sat with bowed head and clasped hands, wondering dully how the bank would live when he was taken away from it. John paid his dinner call promptly, though Mark Tapley would have said there was no great credit in that; it could hardly be termed a call either, for it lasted from eight till eleven. But what, after all, did the hours matter so long as they passed quickly? And then a few nights later they went together to the play, and a little after that was a long Sunday afternoon which ended with their compelling John to stay to tea. His time was fully occupied, for he found a day’s work at the Atlantic very different from anything he had experienced under the stately régime of Bagsbury and Company. Dawson paid for every ounce there was in a man, and he used it. “They’ve piled it on him pretty thick,” the cashier told the president after a month or two; “but he carries it without a stagger. If he can keep up this pace, he’s a gold mine.” He did keep the pace, though it left him few free evenings. Those he had were spent, nearly all of them, with the Sponleys. The fair-haired girl seemed to John, each time he saw her, sweeter and more adorable than she had ever been before, and he saw her often enough to make the progression a rapid one. The hospitality of the Sponleys never flagged. The number of things they thought of that “it would be larks to do,” was legion; and when there was no lark, there was always the long evening in the big firelit room, when Harriet played the piano, and Sponley put his feet on the fender and smoked cigars, and there was nothing to prohibit a boy and a girl from sitting close together on the wide sofa and looking over portfolios of steel engravings from famous paintings--and talking of nothing in particular, or at least not of the steel engravings.