The next day she burned the letters she had received from Rizal before her mother had interfered with her happiness. Following a Filipino custom, she put the ashes into a little box which she covered with a piece of the dress she had worn when she was betrothed and a piece of the dress she had worn when she yielded to her mother about Kipping. The box is still in existence. It bears on its covers the letters “J” and “L” worked in gold. [83] The wedding was fixed for June 17, at Dagupan. A few days before this date, Mrs. Rivera was called to Manila by some business transaction in which she must take a part. She seems to have forgotten the postal clerks, or they to have forgotten their employment; for while she was gone a letter arrived from Rizal to Leonora, and it fell into her hands. She opened it with wonder and trembling, and lo! it was filled with tender reproaches for her long silence. He had written to her regularly by every mail, but all these months had come not a word in answer. Had she forgotten him? The next scene may be deemed to justify the writers both of fiction and of melodrama. Leonora waited in silence until her mother returned from Manila, for her quick intelligence showed her unerringly who had been the author of this wreck of her happiness. The moment her mother opened the door the storm broke. Leonora, for once, defied the restraint the Filipino girl must traditionally feel in the presence of her parents and spared nobody in her passionate denunciation of the treachery of which she had been the victim. Mrs. Rivera seems to have admitted everything and borne with composure the whirlwind of her daughter’s wrath. She knew that the discovery had come too late to disturb her own success. The wedding was close at hand, the banns had been cried, the guests invited, the peculiar Filipino pride was involved and her daughter would hold to her word. Kipping was baptized and became a Catholic. The wedding took place at the appointed hour. Afterward some of her relatives recalled that it was a ceremony without joy or good omens. They said that from it the bride returned in a state of chill lassitude. Contrary to her mother’s hopes, the marriage proved unhappy, and Leonora survived it only two years. CHAPTER VII AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES