red if she had been up to Charlotte's, and if
Charlotte or her mother had been talking to her, and if she knew
about Thomas Payne. He watched her out of sight in a swirl of gay
skirts, her blue and golden head bobbing with her dancing steps; then
he glanced over his shoulder at his poor new house, with its fireless
chimneys. If all had gone well, he and Charlotte would have been
married by this time, and she would have been bestirring herself to
get supper for him--perhaps running home from a neighbor's with her
sewing as this other woman was doing. All the sweet domestic comfort
which he had missed seemed suddenly to toss above his eyes like the
one desired fruit of his whole life; its wonderful unknown flavor
tantalized his soul. All at once he thought how Charlotte would
prepare supper for another man, and the thought seemed to tear his
heart like a panther. "He sha'n't have her!" he cried out, quite
loudly and fiercely. His own voice seemed to quiet him, and he fell
to work again with his mouth set hard.

In half an hour he quitted work, and went up to his house with his
hoe over his shoulder like a bayonet. The house was just as the
workmen had left it on the night before his quarrel with Cephas
Barnard. He had himself fitted some glass into the windows of the
kitchen and bedroom, and boarded up the others--that was all. He had
purchased a few simple bits of furniture, and set up his miserable
bachelor house-keeping. Barney was no cook, and he could purchase no
cooked food in Pembroke. He had subsisted mostly upon milk and eggs
and a poor and lumpy quality of corn-meal mush, which he had made
shift to stir up after many futile efforts.

The first thing which he saw on entering the room to-night was a
generous square of light Indian cake on the table. It was not in a
plate, the edges were bent and crumbling, and the whole square looked
somewhat flattened. Barney knew at once that his father had saved it
from his own supper, had slipped it slyly into his pocket, and stolen
across the field with it. His mother had not given him a mouthful
since she had forbidden him to come home to dinner, and his sister
had not dared.

Barney sat down and ate the Indian cake, a solitary householder at
his solitary table, around which there would never be any faces but
those of his dead dreams. Afterwards he pulled a chair up to an open
window, and sat there, resting his elbows on the sill, staring out
vacantly. The sun set, and t