“Linares is going to challenge him, do you hear? Or don’t let him marry your daughter. If he isn’t courageous, he doesn’t merit Clarita.”
“What! you are going to marry this gentleman?” Sinang asked Maria, her laughing eyes filling with tears. “I know you are discreet, but I didn’t think you inconstant.”
Maria Clara, white as alabaster, looked with great, frightened eyes from her father to Doña Victorina, from Doña Victorina to Linares. The young man reddened; Captain Tiago dropped his head.
“Help me to my room,” Maria said to her friends, and steadied by their round arms, her head on the shoulder of Victorina, she went out.
That night the husband and wife packed their trunks, and presented their account—no trifle—to Captain Tiago. The next morning they set out for Manila, leaving to the pacific Linares the rôle of avenger.
XXXIX.
The Outlawed.
By the feeble moonlight that penetrates the thick foliage of forest trees, a man was making his way through the woods. His movement was slow but assured. From time to time, as if to get his bearings, he whistled an air, to which another whistler in the distance replied by repeating it.
At last, after struggling long against the many obstacles a virgin forest opposes to the march of man, and most obstinately at night, he arrived at a little clearing, bathed in the light of the moon in its first quarter. Scarcely had he entered it when another man came carefully out from behind a great rock, a revolver in his hand.