“Just so, sir; we can do no more.  Remember, then, that you perform your part of this arrangement, and, with the blessing of God, I shall leave nothing undone to perform mine.”

Thus closed this rather extraordinary conversation, after which Sir Robert betook himself home, to reflect upon the best means of performing his part of it, with what quickness and dispatch, and with what success, our readers already know.

The old squire was one of those characters who never are so easily persuaded as when they do not fully comprehend the argument used to convince them.  Whenever the squire found himself a little at fault, or confounded by either a difficult word or a hard sentence, he always took it for granted that there was something unusually profound and clever in the matter laid before him.  Sir Robert knew this, and on that account played him off to a certain extent.  He was too cunning, however, to darken any part of the main argument so far as to prevent its drift from being fully understood, and thereby defeating his own purpose.

CHAPTER VIII.—­A Conflagration—­An Escape—­And an Adventure

We have said that Sir Robert Whitecraft was anything but a popular man—­and we might have added that, unless among his own clique of bigots and persecutors, he was decidedly unpopular among Protestants in general.  In a few days after the events of the night we have described, Reilly, by the advice of Mr. Brown’s brother, an able and distinguished lawyer, gave up the possession of his immense farm, dwelling-house, and offices to the landlord.  In point of fact, this man had taken the farm for Reilly’s father, in his own name, a step which many of the liberal and generous Protestants of that period were in the habit of taking, to protect the property for the Roman Catholics, from such rapacious scoundrels as Whitecraft, and others like him, who had accumulated the greater portion of their wealth and estates by the blackest and most iniquitous political profligacy and oppression.  For about a month after the first night of the unsuccessful pursuit after Reilly, the whole country was overrun with military parties, and such miserable inefficient police as then existed.  In the meantime, Reilly escaped every toil and snare that had been laid for him.  Sir Robert Whitecraft, seeing that hitherto he had set them at defiance, resolved to glut his vengeance on his property, since he could not arrest himself.  A description of his person had been, almost from the commencement of the proceedings, published in the Hue-and-Cry, and he had been now outlawed.  As even this failed, Sir Robert, as we said, came with a numerous party of his myrmidons, bringing along with them a large number of horses, carts, and cars.  The house at this time was in the possession only of a keeper, a poor, feeble man, with a wife and a numerous family of small children, the other servants having fled from the danger in which their connection with