"You know he's a poor tool, an' he's treatin' you mean.

You know he can't begin to come up to a young man like Thomas Payne." "Thomas Payne don't want me, and I don't want him; don't talk any more about it, mother." "I think somebody ought to talk about it," said her mother, and she pushed roughly past Charlotte into the house.
Charlotte sat on the door-step a long while.

"If Thomas Payne has got anybody out West, I guess she'll be glad to see him," she thought.
The fancy pained her, and yet she seemed to see Thomas Payne and Barney side by side, the one like a young prince--handsome and stately, full of generous bravery--the other vaguely crouching beneath some awful deformity, pitiful yet despicable in the eyes of men, and her whole soul cleaved to her old lover.

"What we've got is ours," she said to herself.
As she sat there a band of children went past, with a shrill, sweet clamor of voices.

They were out hanging May-baskets and bunches of anemones.