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.