“Well, I do, then,” his wife retorted.  “We don’t know anything about the woman, or who she is.”

“I guess no harm’ll come to Clem for one night,” said Claxon, and Mrs. Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of her anxiety.  She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not got round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be thought of first.  He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the light of his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and her motives than he had been before.

When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought of something in the nature of credentials.  It was the letter from her church in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she wished she might unite with the church in any place where she happened to be stopping.  It did not make a great impression upon the Klaxons, who were of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the Episcopal church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves.  They said they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if Mrs. Lander did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him, and the rector was brought at once.

He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism, advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and exactions of the native temperament.  On the ecclesiastical side he was conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered as he was simple-hearted.  He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer’s tan on his face and hands.  He pronounced the church-letter, though quite outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability, and he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs. Lander poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference to this or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second hand.  He had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality; it was enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she professed to be.

“You must think,” he said, laughing, “that we are over-particular; but the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good.”

“Of cou’se,” said Mrs. Lander.  “I should be just so myself abort her.”

“I don’t know,” he continued, “that I’ve ever said how much we think of her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is not present.

“She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl as she can without knowing it.  She has a great deal of common-sense, and we all want her to have the best chance.”