ifference. I can't never go to meetin' again."

"I sha'n't tell anybody," said Barney; "I sha'n't ever speak of it to
any human being."

Sylvia turned on him with sudden fierceness. "You had better not,"
said she, "when you're doin' jest the same as Richard Alger yourself,
an' you're makin' Charlotte sit an' watch an' suffer for nothin' at
all, jest as he makes me. You had better not tell of it, Barney
Thayer, when it was all due to your awful will that won't let you
give in to anybody, in the first place, an' when you are so much like
Richard Alger yourself that it's no wonder that anybody that knows
him body and soul, as I do, took you for him. You had better not
tell."

Again Barney seemed to see before his eyes that image of himself as
Richard Alger, and he could no more change it than he could change
his own image in the looking-glass. He said not another word, but
carried the dipper of water back to the kitchen, returned with the
candle, setting it gingerly on the white mantel-shelf between a vase
of dried flowers and a mottle-backed shell, and went out of the
house. Sylvia did not speak again; but he heard her moan as he closed
the door, and it seemed to him that he heard her as he went down the
road, although he knew that he could not.

It was quite dark now; all the light came from a pale wild sky. The
moon was young, and feebly intermittent with the clouds.

Barney, hastening along, was all trembling and unnerved. He tried to
persuade himself that the woman whom he had just left was ill, and
laboring under some sudden aberration of mind; yet, in spite of
himself, he realized a terrible rationality in it. Little as he had
been among the village people of late, and little as he had heard of
the village gossip, he knew the story of Richard Alger's desertion
of Sylvia Crane. Was he not like Richard Alger in his own desertion
of Charlotte Barnard? and had not Sylvia been as little at fault
in taking one for the other as if they had been twin brothers?
Might there not be a closer likeness between characters than
features--perhaps by a repetition of sins and deformities? and might
not one now and then be able to see it?

Then the question came, was Charlotte like Sylvia? Was Charlotte even
now sitting watching for him with that awful eagerness which comes
from a hunger of the heart? He had seen one woman's wounded heart,
and, like most men, was disposed to generalize, and think he had seen
the wounded hearts