Then, too, he reflected that Thomas Payne would probably make her a good husband.  “He can buy her everything she wants,” he thought, with a curious mixture of gratulation for her and agony on his own account.  He thought of the little bonnets he had meant to buy for her himself, and these details pierced his heart like needles.  He sobbed, and the birch-tree quivered in a wind of human grief.  He saw Charlotte going to church in her bridal bonnet with Thomas Payne more plainly than he could ever see her in life, for a torturing imagination reflects life like a magnifying-glass, and makes it clearer and larger than reality.  He saw Charlotte with Thomas Payne, blushing all over her proud, delicate face when he looked at her; he saw her with Thomas Payne’s children.  “O God!” he gasped, and he threw himself down on the ground again, and lay there, face downward, motionless as if fate had indeed seized him and shaken the life out of him and left him there for dead; but it was his own will which was his fate.

“Barney,” his father called, somewhere out in the field.  “Barney, where be you?”

“I’m coming,” Barney called back, in a surly voice, and he pulled himself up and pushed his way out of the thicket to the ploughed field where his father stood.

“Oh, there you be!” said Caleb.  Barney grunted something inarticulate, and took up his hoe again.  Caleb stood watching him, his eyes irresolute under anxiously frowning brows.  “Barney,” he said, at length.

“Well, what do you want?”

“I’ve jest heard—­” the old man began; then he stopped with a jump.

“I don’t want to hear what you’ve heard.  Keep it to yourself if you’ve heard anything!” Barney shouted.

“I didn’t know as you knew,” Caleb stammered, apologetically.  “I didn’t know as you’d heard, Barney.”

Caleb went to the edge of the field, and sat down on a great stone under a wild-cherry tree.  He was not feeling very well; his head was dizzy, and his wife had given him a bowl of thoroughwort and ordered him not to work.

Caleb pushed his hat back and passed his hand across his forehead.  It was hot, and his face was flushed.  He watched his son following up his work with dogged energy as if it were an enemy, and his mind seemed to turn stupid in the face of speculation, like a boy’s over a problem in arithmetic.

There was no human being so strange and mysterious, such an unknown quantity, to Caleb Thayer as his own son.  He had not one trait of character in common with him—­at least, not one so translated into his own vernacular that he could comprehend it.  It was to Caleb as if he looked in a glass expecting to see his own face, and saw therein the face of a stranger.

The wind was quite cool, and blew full on Caleb as he sat there.  Barney kept glancing at him.  At length he spoke.  “You’ll get cold if you sit there in that wind, father,” he sang out, and there was a rude kindliness in his tone.