Don Abrahan my father, that I will not have her, polluted by his kiss."
"This is folly," Don Abrahan reproved him coldly. "What is a kiss more or less, if he kissed her? The sailor never met her alone, never spoke a word to her. But I give him to you. Do with him what your desire leads you to do—when you find him."
"If we find that she is hiding him, will that be proof enough for you of her guilt?"
"It is preposterous; she could not hide him—nobody could hide him," Don Abrahan declared, but contrary to his own deep conviction that somebody, indeed, must be concealing the fugitive. "He has crawled into a cave in the hills; hunger will drive him out tomorrow."
"It is a thing that touches a man's honor. One does not marry a woman whom he has discovered alone with a man."
Roberto judged Helena as Helena judged him and his kind, as revealed in her significant speech to Henderson, explaining why she had hidden herself in the tree. Men were not trusted alone with women in the Spanish-Mexican society of that time; they are not trusted in any greater degree in the same society today.
"Proof would be necessary," Don Abrahan insisted, with such firmness that Roberto knew could not be shaken. "You did not see her. The touch of a shoe, which seemed of the same material you brought from the capital"
