"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.