“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.

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.