“To be sure I do.”

“No, you don’t, sir.  William Reilly, the Jesuit and Papist, is the cause of it, and will be the cause of my utter ruin and ignominious death.”

“How is that?  Make it plain to me; only make that plain to me.”

“He is the bosom friend of Hastings, and can sway him and move him and manage him as a father would a child, or, rather, as a child would a doting father.  Reilly, sir, is at the bottom of this, his great object always having been to prevent a marriage between me and your beautiful daughter; I, who, after all, have done so much for Protestantism, am the victim of that Jesuit and Papist.”

This vindictive suggestion took at once, and the impetuous old squire started as if a new light had been let in upon his mind.  We call him impetuous, because, if he had reflected only for a moment upon the diabolical persecution, both in person and property, which Reilly had sustained at the baronet’s hands, he ought not to have blamed him had! he shot the scoundrel as if he had been one of the most rabid dogs that ever ran frothing across a country.  We say the suggestion, poisoned as it was by the most specious falsehood, failed not to accomplish the villain’s object.

Folliard grasped him by the hand.  “Never-mind,” said he; “keep yourself quiet, and leave Reilly to me; I have him,that’s enough.”

“No,” replied the baronet, “it is not enough, because I know what will happen:  Miss Folliard’s influence over you is a proverb; now she will cajole and flatter and beguile you until she prevails upon you to let the treacherous Jesuit slip through your fingers, and then he will get off to the Continent, and laugh at you all, after having taken her with him; for there is nothing more certain, if he escapes death through your indulgence, than that you will, in the course of a few years, find yourself grandfather to a brood of young Papists; and when I say Papists, need I add rebels?”

“Come,” replied the hot-headed old man, “don’t insult me; I am master of my own house, and, well as I love my daughter, I would not for a moment suffer her to interfere in a public matter of this or any other kind.  Now good-by; keep your spirits up, and if you are to die, why die like a man.”

They then separated; and as Folliard was passing through the hatch, he called the jailer into his own office, and strove to prevail upon him, not ineffectually, to smuggle in some wine and other comforts to the baronet.  The man told him that he would with pleasure do so if he dared; but that the caution against it which he had got that very day from the Board rendered the thing impossible.  Ere the squire left him, however, his scruples were overcome, and the baronet, before he went to bed that night, had a rost duck for supper, with two bottles of excellent claret to wash it down and lull his conscience into slumber.