“No, no,” said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.

When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of certain of Mrs. Lander’s references by letters to Boston, he said to Clementina’s father and mother, “There’s only one danger, now, and that is that she will spoil Clementina; but there’s a reasonable hope that she won’t know how.”  He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh misgiving, which Claxon expressed.  “The way I look at it is like this.  I don’t want that woman should eva think Clem was after her money.  On the face of it there a’n’t very much to her that would make anybody think but what we was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood that we wa’n’t that kind.  But I don’t seem to see any way of tellin’ her.”

“No,” said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, “that would be difficult.”

“It’s plain to be seen,” Mrs. Claxon interposed, “that she thinks a good deal of her money; and I d’ know but what she’d think she was doin’ Clem most too much of a favor anyway.  If it can’t be a puffectly even thing, all round, I d’ know as I should want it to be at all.”

“You’re quite right, Mrs. Claxon, quite right.  But I believe Mrs. Lander may be safely left to look out for her own interests.  After all, she has merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her.  It will be a good opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it may bring her the chance of placing herself in life.  We have got to consider these things with reference to a young girl.”

Mrs. Claxon said, “Of cou’se,” but Claxon did not assent so readily.

“I don’t feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light.  If the chance don’t come to her, I don’t want she should go huntin’ round for it.”

“I thoroughly agree with you,” said the rector.  “But I was thinking that there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is no chance at all.”

“I guess that’s so,” Claxon owned with a laugh.  “Well, I guess we can leave it to Clem to do what’s right and proper everyway.  As you say, she’s got lots of sense.”

From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties which he had abandoned.  She fretted under the load, and expressed an exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her clothes ready for leaving home.  She said finally that she presumed they were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the more she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn’t like, she could come home.  By this time her husband was in something of that insensate eagerness to have the affair over that people feel in a house where there is a funeral.