ar with it, having knitted yards with her thoughts elsewhere,
that she could knit without seeing her needles.

So she sat in the deepening dusk and knitted, and heard the laughter
and shouts of the boys at play a little way down the road with a
deeper pang than Ephraim had ever felt over his own deprivation.

She was glad when the gay hubbub ceased and the boys were haled into
bed. Shortly afterwards she heard out in the road a quick, manly
tread and a merry whistle. She did not know the tune, but only one
young man in Pembroke could whistle like that. "It's Thomas Payne
goin' up to see Charlotte Barnard," she said to herself, with a
bitter purse of her lips in the dark. That merry whistler, passing
her poor cast-out son in his lonely, half-furnished house, whose
dark, shadowy walls she could see across the field, smote her as
sorely as he smote him. It seemed to her that she could hear that
flute-like melody even as far as Charlotte's door. In spite of her
stern resolution to be just, a great gust of wrath shook her.
"Lettin' of him come courtin' her when it ain't six weeks since
Barney went," she said, quite out loud, and knitted fiercely.

But poor Thomas Payne, striding with his harmless swagger up the
hill, whistling as loud as might be one of his college airs, need
not, although she knew it not and he knew it not himself, have
disturbed her peace of mind.

Charlotte, at the cherry party, had asked him, with a certain
dignified shyness, if he could come up to her house that evening, and
he had responded with alacrity. "Why, of course I can," he cried,
blushing joyfully all over his handsome face--"of course I can,
Charlotte!" And he tried to catch one of her hands hanging in the
folds of her purple dress, but she drew it away.

"I want to see you a few minutes about something," she said, soberly;
and then she pressed forward to speak to another girl, and he could
not get another word with her about it.

Charlotte, after she got home from the party, had changed her pretty
new gown for her every-day one of mottled brown calico set with a
little green sprig, and had helped her mother get supper.

Cephas, however, was late, and did not come home until just before
Thomas Payne arrived. Sarah had begun to worry. "I don't see where
your father is," she kept saying to Charlotte. When she heard his
shuffling step on the door-stone she started as if he had been her
lover. When he came in she scrutinized him anxiously