“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.