Ephraim, worsted at length by silence, beat a gradual retreat.  Half-way across the field his panting voice called back, “Barney, Thomas Payne has got your girl,” and ended in a choking giggle.  Barney planted, and made no response; but when Ephraim was well out of sight, he flung down his hoe with a groaning sigh, and went stumbling across the soft loam of the garden-patch into a little woody thicket beside it.  He penetrated deeply between the trees and underbrush, and at last flung himself down on his face among the soft young flowers and weeds.  “Oh, Charlotte!” he groaned out.  “Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte!” Barney began sobbing and crying like a child as he lay there; he moved his arms convulsively, and tore up handfuls of young grass and leaves, and flung them away in the unconscious gesturing of grief.  “Oh, I can’t, I can’t!” he groaned.  “I—­can’t—­Charlotte!  I can’t—­let any other man have you!  No other man shall have you!” he cried out, fiercely, and flung up his head; “you are mine, mine!  I’ll kill any other man that touches you!” Barney got up, and his face was flaming; he started off with a great stride, and then he stopped short and flung an arm around the slender trunk of a white-birch tree, and pulled it against him and leaned against it as if it were Charlotte, and laid his cheek on the cool white bark and sobbed again like a girl.  “Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte!” he moaned, and his voice was drowned out by the manifold rustling of the young birch leaves, as a human grief is overborne and carried out of sight by the soft, resistless progress of nature.

Barney, although his faith in Charlotte had been as strong as any man’s should be in his promised wife, had now no doubt but this other man had met with favor in her eyes.  But he had no blame for her, nor even any surprise at her want of constancy.  He blamed the Lord, for Charlotte as well as for himself.  “If this hadn’t happened she never would have looked at any one else,” he thought, and his thought had the force of a blow against fate.

This Thomas Payne was the best match in the village; he was the squire’s son, good-looking, and college-educated.  Barney had always known that he fancied Charlotte, and had felt a certain triumph that he had won her in the face of it.  “You might have somebody that’s a good deal better off if you didn’t have me,” he said to her once, and they both knew whom he meant.  “I don’t want anybody else,” Charlotte had replied, with her shy stateliness.  Now Barney thought that she had changed her mind; and why should she not?  A girl ought to marry if she could; he could not marry her himself, and should not expect her to remain single all her life for his sake.  Of course Charlotte wanted to be married, like other women.  This probable desire of Charlotte’s for love and marriage in itself, apart from him, thrilled his male fancy with a certain holy awe and respect, from his love for her and utter ignorance of the attitude of womankind.