He thought that Mostyn's eyes wavered. He was sure his lips quivered slightly when he answered.
"I have promised some one else." Saunders failed to see the call for such slow indirectness of response to an ordinary request. Indeed, a touch of color lay in Mostyn's cheeks. "John Webb came to me just now and said that Dolly—or perhaps it may have been her mother—in fact, I'm sure that it must have been Mrs. Drake—-"
"Oh, I see, they've asked you!" Saunders broke in. "Well, I'll have to let you off. You may be sure you'll get something nice. They can beat my cook getting up a spread. Well, I'll meet you later. I see Leach over there by himself. I'll run over and get him on my list." Saunders tried to jest. "They say he lives on wild berries, and nuts, and anything else he can pick up. I guess he won't find fault with my lunch."
Saunders was the host of fifty or more men, women, and children. He was doing his best to see that all were provided for, and yet he had an eye for a certain group under a beech on a near-by hillside. His heart sank, for he saw Mostyn seated on the ground at Dolly's side. He saw something later that sent a cold shock hurtling through him. He saw the group after lunch rise from the cloth and gradually scatter, leaving Dolly and Mostyn standing at the foot of the hill. A moment later they were walking off, side by side, toward a spring in a shaded dell not far away. The drooping boughs of the willow trees shut them out of sight. Saunders, with a hopeless griping of the heart, went about directing his servants and helping some belated guests to get what they wished to eat. He heard himself joking, replying to jokes, and smiling with lips which felt stiff.
The remains of the food had been taken up and replaced in the big baskets when he saw Dolly and Mostyn strolling back from the spring. Mostyn held her sunshade over her, his arm touching hers. The distance was too great for Saunders to see their faces distinctly, but he would have sworn that both reflected joy and peace.
"Oh, God, is it actually to be?" he groaned, inwardly. "Ought it to be? Here am I, eager to gratify her every wish, while he can give her only the dry, crushed remains of his manhood, a bare scrap of his past affluence. He scorned the sweetest flower of womanhood that ever bloomed, and now crawls through his own mire to pluck it. It isn't right—it isn't right! God knows it isn't right to her; leaving me and my hopes out altogether—it isn't right to her!"
Cold from head to foot, Saunders retreated out of sight behind a clump of bushes. Figuratively, he raised his hands to the impotent sky and dumbly cried within himself:
"Oh, God, give me strength to bear it like a man! I was wrong in hoping. She is his; she loves him. She loves him. I am an outsider. I now know why I never dared tell her of my love—my adoration! It was the still, inner voice of warning telling me to keep in my proper place."
Presently he saw Dolly alone near the arbor, and, remembering his engagement with her, he went to her.
"I have come to see if you would care to go now," he began. "I believe there is only some irregular singing and speech-making to follow."