At last one Sunday afternoon in early spring, after months of suspense that seemed years to John, Alice consented to marry him, and John was so happy that he did not blush or stammer, as they had been sure he would, when he told the Sponleys about it. There never was such an illumination as the street lamps made that evening when John walked back to his father’s house; and something in his big dismal room, the single faint-hearted gas-jet, perhaps, threw a rosy glow even over that. When he had left Bagsbury and Company to go to work for Dawson, there had occurred no change in John’s personal relation with his father. That relation had never amounted to much, but they continued to live on not unfriendly terms. Quite unconscious that he was misusing the word, John would have told you that he lived at home. Once on a time, when Martha was a baby, before the loneliness of his mother’s life had made her old, before the commercial crust had grown so thick over the spark of humanity that lurked somewhere in old John Bagsbury, the old house may have been a home; but John had never known it as anything but a place where one might sleep and have his breakfast and his dinner without paying for them. When he and his father met, there was generally some short-lived attempt at conversation, consisting in a sort of set form like the responses in the prayer-book. But one night, as soon as they were seated, John spoke what was on his mind, without waiting for the wonted exchange of courtesies. “Father,” he said, “I’m planning to be married in a few months.” “If your means are sufficient,” the old man answered, “and if you have chosen wisely, as I make no doubt you have, why that is very well, very well.” A little later the father asked abruptly,-- “Are you planning to live here?” Perhaps, in the silent moments just past, there had quickened in his mind a mouldy old memory of a girlish face, and then of a baby’s wailing, a memory that brought a momentary glow into the ashes of his soul, and a hope, gone in the flicker of an eyelash, that a child might again play round his knees. But when John’s answer came, and it came quickly, the father was relieved to hear him say,-- “Oh, no, sir, we’re going to look up a place of our own.” They were to be married next April, and though that time seemed far away to John,--thanks to the economy of the Atlantic National, and to the hours he had with Alice, which merged one into the other, forming in his memory a beatific haze,--it passed quickly enough. The only thing that troubled John was Alice’s total ignorance of banking and her indifference to matters of business generally. One evening, in Harriet’s presence, he offered, half jestingly, to teach her how to manage a bank; but the older woman turned the conversation to something else, and he did not think of it again for a long time.