The next morning Barney went to the store.  It was absolutely necessary for him to go, but he shunned everybody.  He had a horrible fear lest somebody should say, “Hallo, Barney, know Thomas Payne’s goin’ to marry your old girl?” He had planned the very words, and the leer of sly exultation that would accompany it.

But he made his purchase and went out, and nobody spoke to him.  He had not seen Thomas Payne in the back part of the store behind the stove.  Presently Thomas got up and lounged leisurely out through the store, exchanging a word with one and another on his way.  When he got out Barney was going down the road quite a way ahead of him.  Thomas Payne kept on in his tracks.  There was another man coming towards him, and presently he stood aside to let him pass.  “Good-day, Royal,” said Thomas Payne.

“Good-day, Thomas,” returned the other.  “When d’ye get home?”

“Day before yesterday.  How are you this winter, Royal?”

“Well, I’m pretty fair to middlin’.”  The man’s face, sunken in his feeble chest far below the level of Thomas’s eyes, looked up at him with a sort of whimsical patience.  His back was bent like a bow; he had had curvature of the spine for years, from a fall when a young man.

“Glad to hear that,” returned Thomas.  The man passed him, walking as if he were vainly trying to straighten himself at every step.  He held his knees stiff and threw his elbows back, but his back still curved pitifully, although it seemed as if he were half cheating himself into the belief that he was walking as straight as other men.

Thomas walked on rapidly, lessening the distance between himself and Barney.  As he went on he began to have a curious fancy, which he could hardly persuade himself was a fancy.  It seemed to him that Barney Thayer was walking like the man whom he had just met, that his back had that same terrible curve.

Thomas Payne stared in strange bewilderment at Barney’s back.  “It can’t be that he has spine disease, that he has got hurt in any way,” he thought to himself.  The purpose with which he had started out rather paled in his mind.  He walked more rapidly.  It certainly seemed to him that Barney’s back was bent.  He got within hailing distance and called out.

“Hallo!” cried Thomas Payne.

Barney turned around, and it seemed as if he turned with the feeble, crooked motion of the other man.  He saw Thomas Payne, and his face was ghastly white, but he stood still and waited.

“How are you?” Thomas said, gruffly, as he came up.

“How are you, Thomas?” returned Barney.  He looked at Thomas with a dogged expectancy.  He thought he was going to tell him that he was to marry Charlotte.

But Thomas was surveying him still in that strange bewilderment.  “Look here, Barney,” said he, bluntly, “have you been sick?  I haven’t heard of it.”

“No, I haven’t,” replied Barney, wonderingly.