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.