ne 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