"I can't, before God, Thomas."

"Why not?"

Barney raised his right hand and pointed past Thomas.

"You--met--Royal Bennet just--now," he gasped, hoarsely.

Thomas nodded.

"You--saw--his--back?"

"Yes."

"Well, something like that ails me. I--can't help it--before God."

"You don't mean--" Thomas said, and stopped, looking at Barney's back.

"I mean that's why I can't--help it."

"Have you hurt your back?" Thomas asked, in a subdued tone.

"I've hurt my soul," said Barney. "It happened that Sunday night years ago. I--can't get over it. I am bent like his back."

"I should think you'd better get over it, then, if that's all,"

Thomas Payne said, roughly.

"I--can't, any more than he can."

"Do you mean your back's hurt? For God's sake talk sense, Barney!"

Thomas cried out, in bewilderment.

"It's more than my back; it's me."

Thomas stared at Barney; a horror as of something uncanny and abnormal stole over him. Was the man's back curved, or had he by some subtle vision a perception of some terrible spiritual deformity, only symbolized by a curved spine? In a minute he gave an impatient stamp, and tried to shake himself free from the vague pity and horror which the other had aroused.

"Do you know that you are ruining the life of the best woman that ever lived?" he demanded, fiercely.

Barney looked at him, and suddenly there was a flash as of something noble in his face.

"Look here, Thomas," he said, brokenly, in hoarse gasps. "Last night I--went mad, almost, because--I thought--maybe you'd been to see--her. I--saw you coming down the hill. I thought--I'd die thinking of--you--with her. I can't tell you--what I've been through, what I've suffered, and--what I suffer right along. I know I ain't to be pitied. I know--there ain't any pity--anywhere for anything--like this. I don't pity--myself. But it's awful. If you could get a sight of it, you'd know."

Again to Thomas Payne, looking at the other, it was as if he saw a pale agonized face staring up at him from the midst of a curved mass of deformity. He shuddered.

"I don't know what to make of you, Barney Thayer," he said, looking away.

"There's one thing--I want to say," Barney went on. "I think there's enough of a man left in me--I--think I've got strength enough to say it. She--ought to be happy. I don't want her--wasting her whole life--God knows--I don't--no matter what it does--to me. I--wish-- See here, Thomas. I know you--like her. Maybe she'll--turn to you. It seems as if she must. I hope you will--oh, for God's sake, be--good to her, Thomas!"

Thomas Payne's face was as white as Barney's. He turned to go.

"There's no use talking this way. You know Charlotte Barnard as well as I do," he said. "You know she's one of the women that never love any man but one. I don't want another man's wife, if she'd have me."

Suddenly he faced Barney again. "For God's sake, Barney," he cried out, "be a man and go back to her, and marry her!"

Barney shook his head; with a kind of a sob he turned around and went his way without another word. Thomas Payne said no more; he stared after Barney's retreating figure, and again the look of bewilderment and horror was in his face.

That afternoon he asked his father, with a casual air, if he had heard anything about Barney Thayer getting his back injured in any way.

"Why, no, I can't say as I have," returned the squire.

"I saw him this morning, and I thought his back looked as if it was growing like Royal Bennet's. I dare say I imagined it," said Thomas.

Then he went out of the room whistling.

But, during his few weeks' stay in Pembroke, he put the same question to one and another, with varying results. Some said at once, with a sudden look of vague horror, that it was so. That Barney Thayer was indeed growing deformed; that they had noticed it. Others scouted the idea. "Saw him this morning, and he's as straight as he ever was,"

they said.

Whether Barney Thayer'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-step a long while. "If Thomas Payne has got anybody out West, I guess she'll be glad to see him," she thought.

The fancy pained her, and yet she seemed to see Thomas Payne and Barney side by side, the one like a young prince--handsome and stately, full of generous bravery--the other vaguely crouching beneath some awful deformity, pitiful yet despicable in the eyes of men, and her whole soul cleaved to her old lover. "What we've got is ours," she said to herself.

As she sat there a band of children went past, with a shrill, sweet clamor of voices. They were out hanging May-baskets and bunches of anemones. That was the favorite sport of the village children during the month of May. The woods were full of soft, innocent, seeking faces, bending over the delicate bells nodding in the midst of whorls of dark leaves. Every evening, after sundown, there were mysterious bursts of laughter and tiny scamperings around doors, and great balls of bloom swinging from the latchets when they were opened; but no person in sight, only soft gurgles of mirth and delight sounded around a corner of darkness.

After Charlotte went to bed that night she thought she heard somebody at the south door. "It is the children with some may-flowers," she thought. But presently she reflected that it was very late for the children to be out.

After a little while she got up, and stole down-stairs to the door, feeling her way through the dark house.

She opened the south door cautiously, and put her hand out. There were no flowers swinging from the latch as she half expected. Her bare feet touched something on the door-step; she stooped, and there was a great package.

Charlotte took it up, and went noiselessly back to her room with it.

She lighted a candle, and unfastened the paper wrappings. She gave a little cry. There were yards of beautiful silk shimmering with lilac and silver and rose-color, and there was also a fine lace mantle.

Charlotte looked at them; she was quite pale and trembling. She folded the silk and lace again carefully, and put them in a chest out of sight. Then she went back to bed, and lay there crying wildly.