There were about forty young people at the party when all were assembled.  They came mostly in couples, although now and then a little group of girls advanced across the field, and young men came singly.  Barnabas Thayer came alone, and rather late; Rebecca had come some time before with one of her girl mates who had stopped for her.  Barnabas, slender and handsome in his best suit, advancing with a stern and almost martial air, tried not to see Charlotte Barnard; but it was as if her face were the natural focus for his eyes, which they could not escape.  However, Charlotte was not talking to Thomas Payne; he was not even very near her.  He was already in the top of a cherry-tree picking busily.  Barney saw his trim dark head and his bright blue waistcoat among the branches, and his heart gave a guilty throb of relief.  But soon he noted that Charlotte had not her basket, and the conviction seized him that Thomas had it and was filling it with the very choicest cherries from the topmost branches, as was indeed the case.

Charlotte never looked at Barney, although she knew well when he came.  She stood smiling beside another girl, her smooth fair hair gleaming in the sun, her neck showing pink through her embroidered lace kerchief, and her gleaming head and her neck seemed to survey Barney as consciously as her face.  Suddenly the fierceness of the instinct of possession seized him; he said to himself that it was his wife’s neck; no one else should see it.  He felt like tearing off his own coat and covering her with rude force.  It made no difference to him that nearly every other girl there, his sister among the rest, wore her neck uncovered by even a kerchief; he felt that Charlotte should not have done so.  The other young men were swarming up the trees with the girls’ baskets, but he stood aloof with his forehead knitted; it was as if all his reason had deserted him.  All at once there was a rustle at his side, and Rose Berry touched him on the arm; he started, and looked down into her softly glowing little face.

[Illustration:  “Charlotte stood beside another girl”]

“Oh, here you are!” said she, and her voice had adoring cadences.

Barney nodded.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” said she, and she panted softly through her red parted lips.

Rose’s crisp pink muslin gown flared scalloping around her like the pink petals of a hollyhock; her slender white arms showed through the thin sleeves.  Barney could not look away from her wide-open, unfaltering blue eyes, which suddenly displayed to him strange depths.  Charlotte, during all his courtship, had never looked up in his face like that.  He could not himself have told why; but Charlotte had never for one moment lost sight of the individual, and the respect due him, in her lover.  Rose, in the heart of New England, bred after the precepts of orthodoxy, was a pagan, and she worshipped Love himself.  Barney was simply the statue that represented the divinity; another might have done as well had the sculpture been as fine.