But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me.  “Yes, you mean that if he didn’t live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the clever young donkeys of the minute.”

“Maria!” Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.

Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology.  “I wasn’t thinking of you at all!” she declared gayly; and it set me doubting if perhaps she hadn’t, after all, comprehended my impertinence.  “And, thank Heaven!” she continued, “John is one of us, in spite of his present stubborn course.”

But Mrs. Weguelin’s beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that disapproval I had come to know.  To her, sociology and evolution and all “isms” were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter of youth.  She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a kind of lovely maternal gentleness:—­

“We should not wish John to become radical.”

In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined:  hereditary faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation.  I saw her eyes soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.

I addressed Mrs. Gregory.  “By his ‘present stubborn course’ I suppose you mean the Custom House.”

“All of us deplore his obstinacy.  His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly expostulated with him.  And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a position which reflects ignominy upon us all.”

I suppressed a whistle.  I thought (as I have said earlier) that I had caught a full vision of John Mayrant’s present plight.  But my imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael’s act of discipline.  This, it must have been, that the boy had checked himself from telling me in the churchyard.  What a character of sterner times was Miss Josephine!  I thought of Aunt Carola, but even she was not quite of this iron, and I said so to Mrs. Gregory.  “I doubt if there be any old lady left in the North,” I said, “capable of such antique severity.”

But Mrs. Gregory opened my eyes still further.  “Oh, you’d have them if you had the negro to deal with as we have him.  Miss Josephine,” she added, “has to-day removed her sentence of banishment.”

I felt on the verge of new discoveries.  “What!” I exclaimed, “and did she relent?”

“New circumstances intervened,” Mrs. Gregory loftily explained.  “There was an occurrence—­an encounter, in fact—­in which John Mayrant fittingly punished one who had presumed.  Upon hearing of it, this morning, Miss Josephine sent a message to John that he might resume visiting her.