He finally began to adopt the latter belief, as he himself, sometimes on meeting Barney, thought that he walked as erect as he ever had.
Thomas Payne stayed several weeks in Pembroke, and he did not go to see Charlotte.

Once he met her in the street, and stopped and shook hands with gay heartiness.
"He's got over caring about me," Charlotte thought to herself with a strange pang, which shocked and shamed her.

"Most likely he's got somebody out West, where he is," she said to herself firmly; that she ought to be glad if he had, and that she was; and yet she was not, although she never owned it to herself, and was stanchly loyal to her old love.
Charlotte herself often fancied uneasily that Barney's back was growing like Royal Bennet's.

She watched him furtively when she could.

Then she would say to herself, another time, that she must have imagined it.
Thomas Payne went away the first of May.