“Are we all ready?” she asked, brightly. “Then we may as well start.”
“I’m afraid we’re a trifle early, my dear,” said Mrs. Dunn, “but we can stroll about a bit before we go in.”
The captain looked at the library clock. The time was a quarter to eleven.
“Early?” he exclaimed, involuntarily. “Why, I thought Caroline said—”
He stopped, suddenly, realizing that he had spoken aloud. His niece divined his thought and laughed merrily.
“The service does begin now,” she said, “but no one is ever on time.”
“Oh!” ejaculated her uncle, and did not speak again until they were at the door of the church. Then Caroline asked him what he was thinking.
“Nothin’ much,” he answered, gazing at the fashionably garbed throng pouring under the carved stone arch of the entrance; “I was just reorganizin’ my ideas, that’s all. I’ve always sort of thought a plug hat looked lonesome. Now I’ve decided that I’m wearin’ the lonesome kind.”
He marched behind his niece and Mrs. Dunn up the center aisle to the Warren pew. He wrote his housekeeper afterwards that he estimated that aisle to be “upwards of two mile long. And my Sunday shoes had a separate squeak for every inch,” he added.
Once seated, however, and no longer so conspicuous, his common sense and Yankee independence came to his rescue. He had been in much bigger churches than this one, while abroad during his seagoing years. He knew that his clothes were not fashionably cut, and that, to the people about him, he must appear odd and, perhaps, even ridiculous. But he remembered how odd certain city people appeared while summering at South Denboro. Recollections of pointed comments made by boatmen who had taken these summer sojourners on fishing excursions came to his mind. Well, he had one advantage over such people, at any rate, he knew when he was ridiculous, and they apparently did not.