That evening Mrs. Milray came to their table from where she had been dining alone, and asked in banter:  “Well, have you made up your minds to go over with me?”

Mrs. Lander said bluntly, “We can’t ha’dly believe you really want us to, Mrs. Milray.”

“I don’t want you?  Who put such an idea into your head!  Oh, I know!” She threatened Clementina with the door-key, which she was carrying in her hand.  “It was you, was it?  What an artful, suspicious thing!  What’s got into you, child?  Do you hate me?” She did not give Clementina time to protest.  “Well, now, I can just tell you I do want you, and I’ll be quite heart-broken if you don’t come.”

“Well, she wrote to her friends this mohning,” Mrs. Lander said, “but I guess she won’t git an answa in time for youa steamer, even if they do let her go.”

“Oh, yes she will,” Mrs. Milray protested.  “It’s all right, now; you’ve got to go, and there’s no use trying to get out of it.”

She came to them whenever she could find them in the dining-room, and she knocked daily at their door till she knew that Clementina had heard from home.  The girl’s mother wrote, without a punctuation mark in her letter, but with a great deal of sense, that such a thing as her going to Europe could not be settled by telegraph.  She did not think it worth while to report all the facts of a consultation with the rector which they had held upon getting Clementina’s request, and which had renewed all the original question of her relations with Mrs. Lander in an intensified form.  He had disposed of this upon much the same terms as before; and they had yielded more readily because the experiment had so far succeeded.  Clementina had apparently no complaint to make of Mrs. Lander; she was eager to go, and the rector and his wife, who had been invited to be of the council, were both of the opinion that a course of European travel would be of the greatest advantage to the girl, if she wished to fit herself for teaching.  It was an opportunity that they must not think of throwing away.  If Mrs. Lander went to Florence, as it seemed from Clementina’s letter she thought of doing, the girl would pass a delightful winter in study of one of the most interesting cities in the world, and she would learn things which would enable her to do better for herself when she came home than she could ever hope to do otherwise.  She might never marry, Mr. Richling suggested, and it was only right and fair that she should be equipped with as much culture as possible for the struggle of life; Mrs. Richling agreed with this rather vague theory, but she was sure that Clementina would get married to greater advantage in Florence than anywhere else.  They neither of them really knew anything at first hand about Florence; the rector’s opinion was grounded on the thought of the joy that a sojourn in Italy would have been to him; his wife derived her hope of a Florentine marriage for Clementina from several romances in which love and travel had gone hand in hand, to the lasting credit of triumphant American girlhood.