celebrate his supposed daughter's engagement, Ibarra makes his escape
from prison and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to
reproach her because it is a letter written to her before he went to
Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears
herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by
false representations and in exchange for two others written by her
mother just before her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her
real father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the
convento by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the girl
and get possession of Ibarra's letter, from which he forged others
to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the
young Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother's name
and Capitan Tiago's honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that
she will always remain true to him.

Ibarra's escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a
banka up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by
the Civil Guard that Elias leaps into the water and draws the pursuers
away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.

On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood,
Elias appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio
beside the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven
to insanity by her husband's neglect and abuses on the part of the
Civil Guard, her younger son having disappeared some time before in
the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of
Elias's identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his
corpse and the madwoman's are to be burned.

Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake,