“What?” Sylvia said, feebly, looking up at him.  “I don’t know what you say, Richard; I wish you’d say it again.”

“I ain’t Richard Alger; I am Barney Thayer,” repeated Barney, in a loud, distinct voice.  Sylvia’s straining, questioning eyes did not leave his face.  “You made a mistake,” said Barney.

Sylvia turned her eyes away; she laid her head down on the arm of the hair-cloth sofa, and gasped faintly.  Barney bent over her.  “Now don’t feel bad, Miss Crane,” said he; “I sha’n’t ever say a word about this to anybody.”

Sylvia made no reply; she lay there half gasping for breath, and her face looked deathly to Barney.

“Miss Crane, are you sick?” he cried out in alarm.  When she did not answer, he even laid hold of her shoulder, and shook her gently, and repeated the question.  He did not know if she were faint or dying; he had never seen anybody faint or die.  He wished instinctively that his mother were there; he thought for a second of running for her in spite of everything.

“I’ll go and get some water for you, Miss Crane,” he said, desperately, and seized the candle, and went with it, flaring and leaving a wake of smoke, out into the kitchen.  He presently came back with a dipper of water, and held it dripping over Sylvia.  “Hadn’t you better drink a little?” he urged.  But Sylvia suddenly motioned him away and sat up.  “No, I don’t want any water; I don’t want anything after this,” she said, in a quick, desperate tone.  “I can never look anybody in the face again.  I can never go to meetin’ again.”

“Don’t you feel so about it, Miss Crane,” Barney pleaded, his own voice uncertain and embarrassed.  “The room ain’t very light, and it’s dark outside; maybe I do look like him a little.  It ain’t any wonder you made the mistake.”

“It wa’n’t that,” returned Sylvia.  “I dunno what the reason was; it don’t make any difference.  I can’t never go to meetin’ again.”

“I sha’n’t tell anybody,” said Barney; “I sha’n’t ever speak of it to any human being.”

Sylvia turned on him with sudden fierceness.  “You had better not,” said she, “when you’re doin’ jest the same as Richard Alger yourself, an’ you’re makin’ Charlotte sit an’ watch an’ suffer for nothin’ at all, jest as he makes me.  You had better not tell of it, Barney Thayer, when it was all due to your awful will that won’t let you give in to anybody, in the first place, an’ when you are so much like Richard Alger yourself that it’s no wonder that anybody that knows him body and soul, as I do, took you for him.  You had better not tell.”

Again Barney seemed to see before his eyes that image of himself as Richard Alger, and he could no more change it than he could change his own image in the looking-glass.  He said not another word, but carried the dipper of water back to the kitchen, returned with the candle, setting it gingerly on the white mantel-shelf between a vase of dried flowers and a mottle-backed shell, and went out of the house.  Sylvia did not speak again; but he heard her moan as he closed the door, and it seemed to him that he heard her as he went down the road, although he knew that he could not.