Barney felt a pang of misery as this fair, severe, and happy face passed him by.  He wondered if she had been up to Charlotte’s, and if Charlotte or her mother had been talking to her, and if she knew about Thomas Payne.  He watched her out of sight in a swirl of gay skirts, her blue and golden head bobbing with her dancing steps; then he glanced over his shoulder at his poor new house, with its fireless chimneys.  If all had gone well, he and Charlotte would have been married by this time, and she would have been bestirring herself to get supper for him—­perhaps running home from a neighbor’s with her sewing as this other woman was doing.  All the sweet domestic comfort which he had missed seemed suddenly to toss above his eyes like the one desired fruit of his whole life; its wonderful unknown flavor tantalized his soul.  All at once he thought how Charlotte would prepare supper for another man, and the thought seemed to tear his heart like a panther.  “He sha’n’t have her!” he cried out, quite loudly and fiercely.  His own voice seemed to quiet him, and he fell to work again with his mouth set hard.

In half an hour he quitted work, and went up to his house with his hoe over his shoulder like a bayonet.  The house was just as the workmen had left it on the night before his quarrel with Cephas Barnard.  He had himself fitted some glass into the windows of the kitchen and bedroom, and boarded up the others—­that was all.  He had purchased a few simple bits of furniture, and set up his miserable bachelor house-keeping.  Barney was no cook, and he could purchase no cooked food in Pembroke.  He had subsisted mostly upon milk and eggs and a poor and lumpy quality of corn-meal mush, which he had made shift to stir up after many futile efforts.

The first thing which he saw on entering the room to-night was a generous square of light Indian cake on the table.  It was not in a plate, the edges were bent and crumbling, and the whole square looked somewhat flattened.  Barney knew at once that his father had saved it from his own supper, had slipped it slyly into his pocket, and stolen across the field with it.  His mother had not given him a mouthful since she had forbidden him to come home to dinner, and his sister had not dared.

Barney sat down and ate the Indian cake, a solitary householder at his solitary table, around which there would never be any faces but those of his dead dreams.  Afterwards he pulled a chair up to an open window, and sat there, resting his elbows on the sill, staring out vacantly.  The sun set, and the dusk deepened; the air was loud with birds; there were shouts of children in the distance; gradually these died away, and the stars came out.  The wind was damp and sweet; over in the field pale shapes of mist wavered and changed like phantoms.  A woman came running noiselessly into the yard, and pressed against the door panting, and knocked.  Barney saw the swirl of light skirts around the corner; then the knock came.