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