out 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