She did not know the tune, but only one young man in Pembroke could whistle like that.

"It's Thomas Payne goin' up to see Charlotte Barnard," she said to herself, with a bitter purse of her lips in the dark.

That merry whistler, passing her poor cast-out son in his lonely, half-furnished house, whose dark, shadowy walls she could see across the field, smote her as sorely as he smote him.

It seemed to her that she could hear that flute-like melody even as far as Charlotte's door.

In spite of her stern resolution to be just, a great gust of wrath shook her.
"Lettin' of him come courtin' her when it ain't six weeks since Barney went," she said, quite out loud, and knitted fiercely.
But poor Thomas Payne, striding with his harmless swagger up the hill, whistling as loud as might be one of his college airs, need not, although she knew it not and he knew it not himself, have disturbed her peace of mind.
Charlotte, at the cherry party, had asked him, with a certain dignified shyness, if he could come up to her house that evening, and he had responded with alacrity.