I avert my face, but it is too late. She has seen my hat thrown on anyhow, as it were with a pitchfork--has seen my face swollen with weeping, and great tears still standing unwiped on my flushed cheeks. What is far, _far_ worse, she has seen him, too. This is the last drop in an already over-full cup. There is nothing in sight now--not even a cart--so I sit down on a heap of stones by the road-side, and, covering my hot face with my hands, cry till I have no more eyes left to cry with. Can _this_ be the day I called good? Can _this_ be that bright and merry day, when I walked elate and laughing between the deep furrows, and heard the blackbird and thrush woo their new loves, nor was able myself to refrain from singing? My brain is a black chaos of whirling agonies, now together, now parting; so that each may make their separate sting felt, and, in turn, each will have to be faced. Preëminent among the dark host, towering above even the thought of Barbara, is the sense of my own degradation. There must have been something in my conduct to justify his taking me so confidently for the bad, light woman he did. One does not get such a character for nothing. I have always heard that, when such things happen to people, they have invariably brought them on themselves. In incoherent misery, I run over in my head, as well as the confusion of it will let me, our past meetings and dialogues. In almost all, to my distorted view, there now seems to have been an unseemly levity. Things I have said to him; easy, familiar jokes that I have had with him; not that _he_ ever had much sense of a jest--(even at this moment I think this incidentally)--course through my mind. Our many _tête-à-têtes_ to which, at the time, I attached less than no importance: through many of which I unfeignedly, irresistibly _gaped_; our meetings in the park--accidental, as I thought--our dawdling saunters through the meadows, as often as not at twilight; all, _all_ recur to me, and, recurring, make my face burn with a hot and stabbing shame.