hayer's back was, indeed, bowed into that terrible
spinal curve or not, Thomas Payne could not tell by any agreement of
witnesses. If some, gifted with acute spiritual insight, really
perceived that dreadful warping of a diseased will, and clothed it
with a material image for their own grosser senses; or if Barney,
through dwelling upon his own real but hidden infirmity, had actually
come unconsciously to give it a physical expression, and walked at
times through the village with his back bent like his spirit,
although not diseased, Thomas Payne could only speculate. He finally
began to adopt the latter belief, as he himself, sometimes on meeting
Barney, thought that he walked as erect as he ever had.

Thomas Payne stayed several weeks in Pembroke, and he did not go to
see Charlotte. Once he met her in the street, and stopped and shook
hands with gay heartiness.

"He's got over caring about me," Charlotte thought to herself with a
strange pang, which shocked and shamed her. "Most likely he's got
somebody out West, where he is," she said to herself firmly; that she
ought to be glad if he had, and that she was; and yet she was not,
although she never owned it to herself, and was stanchly loyal to her
old love.

Charlotte herself often fancied uneasily that Barney's back was
growing like Royal Bennet's. She watched him furtively when she
could. Then she would say to herself, another time, that she must
have imagined it.

Thomas Payne went away the first of May. That evening Charlotte sat
on the door-step in the soft spring twilight. Her mother had just
come home from her sister Hannah Berry's. "Thomas Payne went this
afternoon," her mother said, standing before her.

"Did he?" said Charlotte.

"You might have had him if you hadn't stuck to a poor stick that
ain't fit to tie your shoes up!" Sarah cried out, with sudden
bitterness. Her voice sounded like Hannah Berry's. Charlotte knew
that was just what her aunt Hannah had said about it.

"I don't ask him to tie my shoes up," returned Charlotte.

"You can stan' up for him all you want to," said her mother. "You
know he's a poor tool, an' he's treatin' you mean. You know he can't
begin to come up to a young man like Thomas Payne."

"Thomas Payne don't want me, and I don't want him; don't talk any
more about it, mother."

"I think somebody ought to talk about it," said her mother, and she
pushed roughly past Charlotte into the house.

Charlotte sat on the door-s