“It was the kinder because I had forced you away. If I can make any return—”
“You can.” She filled his pause. “During the last six months I had time for reflection, and the more I thought of it the more I wondered at myself for my easy yielding to your will. It is not that I was unwilling to do that or more for your mother. But to be sent away like a naughty school girl under a solemn vow against correspondence—”
“The price of your consent, you remember, was the gringo’s life?” His eye lit with the old saturnine sparkle. “As you see, he still cumbers good Mexican earth.”
“You dared not have harmed him in any case.”
“No?”
“No.” She met without flinching his look of sarcastic interrogation. “Porfirio Diaz will not stand for the killing of Americanos. As you well know, Sebastien, he would surely have hunted you down.”
“If there had been any to tell? Even your folly would hardly have arisen to that.”
“’Twould not have been necessary. If I had warned him, placed your threat on record with his friends, ’twere sufficient. If not, there is still another argument that would have held you.”
“And that?”
“The sure knowledge that I would hate you forever.”