At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off.  Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up.  Her father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander’s hand baggage and took the final fee she thrust upon him.  When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background, where she could not see into it from the outside.  He said that he had felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like.  But he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in it, and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them.  He owned that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.

“I guess,” said his wife, grimly, “we’re a passel o’ fools to let her go.  Even if she don’t like, the’a, with that crazy-head, she won’t be the same Clem when she comes back.”

They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as they drove home behind Claxon’s self-broken colt:  a creature that had taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example to its kind in sobriety and industry.

The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up before a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her.  She had seen them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform, and waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them, but they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.

At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house.  Not to have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could bear.

The rector’s wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of this world’s kingdoms than a clergyman’s wife ought ever to see, even for another.  She decided that Clementina’s chances of making a splendid match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with her native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe, where Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her.  If she did not take her to Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and this would serve the same end, though more indirectly.