Though she looked disappointed, she gave way when he explained Billy’s need; the more readily, perhaps, because she felt within her the stirrings of the feminine instinct to hide and brood over her new happiness all alone. The feeling even formed her speech. “The poor señor Thornton! He must be very lonely over there all by himself, and he must be fed. I shall not mind—for a few days. You have given me—so much to think about. But then—you will come?”
He groaned inwardly at the thought of that which their next meeting entailed, and had it been possible he would have preferred to make open confession there and then. As it was not, he let her ride away with her own clear happiness undimmed, unconscious of the stab inflicted by her last tender whisper.
“Surely I shall come,” he had answered; and, after mounting his horse, he sat and watched her ride away among the trees. When, with a parting wave, she disappeared, his sun went out, yet through his bitter feeling he remembered his promise.
“Tomas!” He called the mozo back. Ignorant of just how much the fellow had seen, he tried him out with the Spanish proverb, “‘The saints are good to the blind.’”
At the sight of the five-peso note in Seyd’s hand the mozo’s white teeth flashed in a knowing grin. “Si, señor,” he answered in kind, “neither do flies enter a closed mouth.” And, pocketing the note, he galloped after his mistress, leaving Seyd to go his own way.
It was not pleasant, either, the path that Seyd pursued the next few days. Going back to the inn, following the mules out to and back from the railroad, crossing and recrossing the river with Billy’s supplies, fits of rebellion alternated with moods of black self reproach.
“If you had declared yourself in the beginning she would never have given you a second thought.”
Up to the moment when he turned his horse’s head once more toward San Nicolas, a few days later, this formed the text of his musings; and if he winced when the gold of the hacienda walls broke along the green foothills it was not in pity for himself. If it would have freed her from pain he would have hugged his own with the savage exultance of a flagellant. But too well he knew that in these things there is no vicarious atonement, and the face that he carried into the San Nicolas patio was so grim and sad that it provoked Don Luis’s comment.
“Señor, you are sick? Before she left Francesca told us of the accident. ’Tis plain that you are not yet recovered.”