The guests come bearing or sending beautiful gifts. Simoun presents a lamp of strange and beautiful design—burning. In it is a charge of dynamite sufficient to blow up the house and all in it. This will furnish the signal for the attack. He has told this to Basilio. Outside the house of festival, Isagani lingers, hoping to catch one farewell glimpse of the sweetheart he has lost. Basilio sees him and tries to lead him away before the explosion. Isagani refuses to move. In despair Basilio tells him what is afoot about the lamp. Isagani, overwhelmed with horror at the thought that the woman he loves is about to perish, runs into the house, seizes the lighted lamp, throws it into the river, and follows it there before any one has a chance to stop him. [157] Great excitement follows, in which something of the plot is revealed; and Simoun is unmasked, but not until he has had a chance to escape. He is pursued and wounded. He dies in the house of a Filipino family where he has found refuge. On his death-bed he confesses to a priest his real name and story. [158] “God will forgive you, Señor Simoun,” says the priest. “He knows that we are fallible. He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement of your faults should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!” “According to you, then,” feebly responded the sick man, “His will is that these Islands——” “Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?” continued the priest, seeing that the other hesitated. “I don’t know, sir, I can’t read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that he has not abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted in Him and made Him the judge of their cause. I know His arm has never failed when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse gone, the oppressed have taken up the sword to fight for home and wife and children, for their inalienable rights, which, as the German poet says, shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like the eternal stars themselves. No, God is justice; He cannot abandon His cause, the cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible.” Nothing could be plainer: Rizal is enforcing with a final warning the lesson of his book. “Why, then, has He denied me His aid?” asked the sick man in a voice charged with bitter complaint.