Finding no words with which to push away the obstacle of Nahal, she swept on quickly: “Do you know what I might do with my Filipino ward? He’s a small brown creature for whom there doesn’t seem to be a place in the world. I’m not a capable Providence, I fear. He wouldn’t be left behind, so I just had to bring him along with me—though what I was to do with an eleven-year-old Filipino boy, I couldn’t think. But you should have seen his little face that day looking across the water toward the magic lands. I seldom know what to do with myself, to say nothing of anybody else. What do you think I could do with him?”
“Give him to me. The boys in my house have their duties so confounded that domestic activity has very nearly come to a halt. Delphine who is just from the Provinces, and honest, can act as an official tattle-tale and break the gang. Why should you be discouraged over the nonconformity of the island of Nahal,” he demanded, “when I cannot evoke industry from a single native in my home?”
Julie pondered. “He ought to go to school,” she said. “You see, he’s a very special person. He’s caught the fire, too, and wants to forge ahead.”
“There is a school within a few squares of my house. We’ll let him go right on to school till he makes a destiny for himself, and some day when he’s president of the Philippine republic, he’ll raise a statue to you on the Luneta, as the Light of Ages.”
“I think I must have stumbled on a fairy god-father!” Julie smiled. “But they say you’re that to everybody.”
“That’s not true. I’ve never been as nice to anybody as I’ve been to you. Don’t dream for a minute that I go round adopting stray children that everybody has picked up.”
Julie laughed. “Perhaps we’d better go and move about a bit.”
They came near a group of people who seemed to have congregated in a corner of a room. Julie heard the word “Independencia!” burst with a little shock into the midst of them.
A man spoke up as if in answer to its challenge: “We are within the walls of the East—where we were called by Fate—for issues greater than we can to-day foresee.”
Julie remembered the speaker, Matfield Barron, whom Ellis Wilbur had described to her. She saw that he was addressing Isabel, who stood smiling with quiet irony.