Grace looked tempted.

“I’ve a good mind to go with you,” she said.  “I want to be with you as much as I can, and he isn’t there yet.  I’m afraid uncle might not like it, but—­”

“Sho!  Come along.  Eben Hammond may be a chronic sufferer from acute Come-Outiveness, but he ain’t a ninny.  Nobody’ll see you, anyway.  This fog’s like charity, it’ll cover a heap of sins.  Do come right along.  Wait till I get on my things.”

She threw a shawl over her shoulders, draped a white knitted “cloud” over her head, and took from a nail a key, attached by a strong cord to a block of wood eight inches long.

“Elkanah left the key with me,” she observed.  “No danger of losin’ it, is there.  Might as well lose a lumber yard.  Old Parson Langley tied it up this way, so he wouldn’t miss his moorin’s, I presume likely.  The poor old thing was so nearsighted and absent-minded along toward the last that they say he used to hire Noah Myrick’s boy to come in and look him over every Sunday mornin’ before church, so’s to be sure he hadn’t got his wig on stern foremost.  That’s the way Zeb Mayo tells the yarn, anyhow.”

They left the house and came out into the wet mist.  Then, turning to the right, in the direction which Trumet, with unconscious irony, calls “downtown,” they climbed the long slope where the main road mounts the outlying ridge of Cannon Hill, passed Captain Mayo’s big house—­the finest in Trumet, with the exception of the Daniels mansion—­and descended into the hollow beyond.  Here, at the corner where the “Lighthouse Lane” begins its winding way over the rolling knolls and dunes to the light and the fish shanties on the “ocean side,” stood the plain, straight-up-and-down meeting house of the Regular society.  Directly opposite was the little parsonage, also very straight up and down.  Both were painted white with green blinds.  This statement is superfluous to those who remember Cape architecture at this period; practically every building from Sandwich to Provincetown was white and green.

They entered the yard, through the gap in the white fence, and went around the house, past the dripping evergreens and the bare, wet lilac bushes, to the side door, the lock of which Keziah’s key fitted.  There was a lock on the front door, of course, but no one thought of meddling with that.  That door had been opened but once during the late pastor’s thirty-year tenantry.  On the occasion of his funeral the mourners came and went, as was proper, by that solemn portal.

Mrs. Coffin thrust the key into the keyhole of the side door and essayed to turn it.

“Humph!” she muttered, twisting to no purpose; “I don’t see why—­This must be the right key, because—­Well, I declare, if it ain’t unlocked already!  That’s some of Cap’n Elkanah’s doin’s.  For a critter as fussy and particular about some things, he’s careless enough about others.  Mercy we ain’t had any tramps around here lately.  Come in.”