Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was not bettered by the handling it had from the governing class after his flight. Evil propaganda has always been easy to great power in any form. In his absence the spies and agents provocateurs of the Government made it but the day’s work to smear with lies the name of Rizal. “Some of it will stick,” is the philosophy of the professional slanderer. In this case the word proved true enough. Mrs. Rivera seems to have been much affected by the sad decline and fall of her prospective son-in-law. She was an excellent lady but one that set exaggerated store by the verdict of society and what Shelley called the great god “They Say.” Among all colonists everywhere this is a deity of might. With the slender group of Filipinos that strove to grasp the skirts of a society drawn disdainfully away from them, the cult amounted sometimes to a frenzy. The reports that came from Madrid about Leonora’s lover, or were affirmed to come thence, were no salve to the mother’s wounded sensibilities. He was said to associate with sad young dogs, revolutionists and outcasts and all that, with Filipinos that had been exiled after the governmental sand-dance of 1872 and with other agencies of treason. The thought of the career that such a man would probably have in the Philippines seems to have struck Mrs. Rivera with inexpressible terror. What her friends and social co-mates would say when her daughter should be married to one sure to be a pariah if not a victim of the garrote was beyond her strength to endure. 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. [80] Cold fell her eulogies on Leonora’s ears. When Kipping talked love to her she told him frankly that she was engaged to marry Rizal, whom she loved and would always love, and that another suitor was for her impossible.