Thomas Payne's face was as white as Barney's. He turned to go. "There's no use talking this way. You know Charlotte Barnard as well as I do," he said. "You know she's one of the women that never love any man but one. I don't want another man's wife, if she'd have me." Suddenly he faced Barney again. "For God's sake, Barney," he cried out, "be a man and go back to her, and marry her!" Barney shook his head; with a kind of a sob he turned around and went his way without another word. Thomas Payne said no more; he stared after Barney's retreating figure, and again the look of bewilderment and horror was in his face. That afternoon he asked his father, with a casual air, if he had heard anything about Barney Thayer getting his back injured in any way. "Why, no, I can't say as I have," returned the squire. "I saw him this morning, and I thought his back looked as if it was growing like Royal Bennet's. I dare say I imagined it," said Thomas. Then he went out of the room whistling. But, during his few weeks' stay in Pembroke, he put the same question to one and another, with varying results. Some said at once, with a sudden look of vague horror, that it was so. That Barney Thayer was indeed growing deformed; that they had noticed it. Others scouted the idea. "Saw him this morning, and he's as straight as he ever was," they said. 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.