Barney used to look at her moving down the road at Charlotte's side, as at the merest supernumerary on his own tragic stage.

But every tragedy has its multiplying glass to infinity, and every actor has his own tragedy.

Sylvia Crane that winter, all secretly and silently, was acting her own principal role in hers.

She had quite come to the end of her small resources, and nobody, except the selectmen of Pembroke, knew it.

They were three saturnine, phlegmatic, elderly men, old Squire Payne being the chairman, and they kept her secret well.
Sylvia waylaid them in by-places, she stole around to the back door of Squire Payne's house by night, she conducted herself as if it were a guilty intrigue, and all to keep her poverty hid as long as may be.
Old Squire Payne was a widower, a grave old man of few words.