Note 4 — Chapter VI · LEONORA RIVERA

She had also the strange notion that steals into the minds of some subjugated people that intermarriage with the dominant color promises relief from the sting of inferiority. About this time the railroad was being extended to Dagupan, and a young English engineer, Henry C. Kipping, came to take charge of the building of the last section of the new line from Bayambang. His work took him often to Dagupan, where he met and fell in love with Leonora. He seems to have urged his suit with ardor and persistence and to have had from the beginning an adroit partisan in Leonora’s mother. Here had come, as if by the order of Providence, a means to save her daughter from an unhappy marriage. How much better to wed an English engineer than a Filipino agitator! With joy she seized every opportunity to praise the ingenious Kipping, gave thanks (for she was of a resolute devotion) to the wisdom that had arranged all this, and even prepared to give it help of her own devising.4