The girl laughed again.  For one brought up, since her seventh year, in the strictest of Come-Outer families, she laughed a good deal.  Many Come-Outers considered it wicked to laugh.  Yet Grace did it, and hers was a laugh pleasant to hear and distinctly pleasant to see.  It made her prettier than ever, a fact which, if she was aware of it, should have been an additional preventive, for to be pretty smacks of vanity.  Perhaps she wasn’t aware of it.

“What do you think Uncle Eben would say if he heard that?” she asked.

“Say I took after my father, too, I presume likely.  Does your uncle know you come here to see me so often?  And call me ‘aunt’ and all that?”

“Of course he does.  Aunt Keziah, you mustn’t think Uncle Eben doesn’t see the good in people simply because they don’t believe as he does.  He’s as sweet and kind as—­”

“Who?  Eben Hammond?  Land sakes, child, don’t I know it?  Cap’n Eben’s the salt of the earth.  I’m a Regular and always have been, but I’d be glad if my own society was seasoned with a few like him.  ’Twould taste better to me of a Sunday.”  She paused, and then added quizzically:  “What d’you s’pose Cap’n Elkanah and the rest of our parish committee would say if they heard that?”

“Goodness knows!  Still, I’m glad to hear you say it.  And uncle says you are as good a woman as ever lived.  He thinks you’re misled, of course, but that some day you’ll see the error of your ways.”

“Humph!  I’ll have to hurry up if I want to see ’em without spectacles.  See my errors!  Land sakes! much as I can do to see the heads of these tacks.  Takin’ up carpets is as hard a test of a body’s eyesight as ’tis of their religion.”

Her companion put down the tablecloth she was folding and looked earnestly at the other woman.  To an undiscerning eye the latter would have looked much as she always did—­plump and matronly, with brown hair drawn back from the forehead and parted in the middle; keen brown eyes with a humorous twinkle in them—­this was the Keziah Coffin the later generation of Trumet knew so well.

But Grace Van Horne, who called her aunt and came to see her so frequently, while her brother was alive and during the month following his death, could see the changes which the month had wrought.  She saw the little wrinkles about the eyes and the lines of care about the mouth, the tired look of the whole plucky, workaday New England figure.  She shook her head.

“Religion!” she repeated.  “I do believe, Aunt Keziah, that you’ve got the very best religion of anybody I know.  I don’t care if you don’t belong to our church.  When I see how patient you’ve been and how cheerful through all your troubles, it—­”