Roberto entered presently, refreshed by razor and clean garments. His face was gloomy for all the brightness of his raiment; there was a sulkiness in the corners of his drooping lips as of a resentful child. He sat at the end of the table, dark, handsome; soft in his habit of indolence, yet enduring from the very breed of him, more boy than man in spite of his years. There was promise in his well-carried head, capability in his small, compact hands. Experience, hardship, renunciation by force, might harden this indulged boy into a formidable man, such as the gray, sharp-featured one across the table. "You are wrong, father, when you think he roams the hills without a friend," Roberto said. He scarcely had settled in the rough chair with rawhide seat, but with the words he got to his feet again, walked rapidly across the room, stood at a window where a last spear of sunlight came through filtered of its white strength by the smoky haze of the hills. "You believe some American in the pueblo is hiding him?" Don Abrahan asked. He was unmoved by his son's perturbation. He watched the young man furtively, head bent, fingers interlaced meditatively at the tip of his beard. It was as if he tried an experiment in psychology, and waited the result. "No, there is no American in the pueblo who would risk it. But there is another, not in the pueblo. He is not without a friend." Don Abrahan lifted his head, his eyes open wide. He put a hand to the table, leaning forward as if to rise. "What is it you have learned today?" he asked. Roberto turned from the window to stand with hands on the back of his chair, deliberating his next word, it seemed. He sat down, drew the chair close to the table, leaning confidentially toward his father, eye to the windows to see that nobody loitered near. "There is something to be told to the shame of this house," he said, with such intense feeling that caused his father to stare. "There is a thing I have kept from you since the night of this ruffianly assault. Now you must hear it, but it burns my heart with shame to speak the words." "How? What is this thing you preface with such terrible beginning?" Don Abrahan was thoroughly aroused. He glanced behind him to see that the door letting into the rest of the house was closed; and over his shoulder to make certain that the door opening out of it into the convenient courtyard that might, in time of stress, contain a man's saddled horse, did not show a crack. "It is the infidelity and disgrace of one that was most dear," Roberto said, his head drooping with shame of the confession. "Helena--it was Helena who met him under the tree that cursed night. It was Helena's slipper that Don Fernando picked up. She lost it when she fled." "But no, no. Did you see her, my son?"