, the
legal owner of them, or to her father."

The sheriff received the caske't which contained them, and immediately
handed it to Mr. Folliard, who put it in his pocket, exclaiming:

"Now, Reilly, if we can hang you for nothing else, we can hang you for
this; and we will, sir."

"You, sir," said Reilly, with melancholy indignation, "are privileged
to insult me; so, alas! is every man now; but I can retire into the
integrity of my own heart and find a consolation there of which you
cannot deprive me. My life is now a consideration of no importance to
myself since I shall die with the consciousness that your daughter loved
me. You do not hear this for the first time, for that daughter avowed
it to yourself! and if I had been mean and unprincipled enough to have
abandoned my religion, and that of my persecuted forefathers, I might
ere this have been her husband."

"Come," said Folliard, who was not prepared with an answer to this,
"come," said he, addressing the sheriff, "come, till we make out his
_mittimus_, and give him the first shove to the gallows." They then left
him.

CHAPTER XXI.--Sir Robert Accepts of an Invitation.

The next morning rumor had, as they say, her hands and tongues very full
of business. Reilly and the Red Rapparee were lodged in Sligo jail that
night, and the next morning the fact was carried by the aforesaid rumor
far and wide over the whole country. One of the first whose ears it
reached was the gallant and virtuous Sir Robert Whitecraft, who no
sooner heard it than he ordered his horse and rode at a rapid rate
to see Mr. Folliard, in order, now that Reilly was out of the way, to
propose an instant marriage with the _Cooleen Bawn_. He found the old
man in a state very difficult to be described, for he had only just
returned to the drawing-room from the strongly sentinelled chamber of
his daughter. Indignation against Reilly seemed now nearly lost in the
melancholy situation of the wretched _Cooleen Bawn_. He had just seen
her, but, somehow, the interview had saddened and depressed his heart.
Her position and the state of her feelings would have been pitiable,
even to the eye of a stranger; what, then, must they not have been to a
father who loved her as he did? "Helen," said he, as he took a chair
in her room, after her guards had been desired to withdraw for a time,
"Helen, are you aware that you have eternally disgraced your own name,
and that of your father and your family?"