uted for the same
crime--is murdered. They will tell us it would be a prostitution of the
prerogative of the Crown to connive at crime in the rich and punish it
in the poor. And, again, there's the devil of it; your beggarly want of
hospitality in the first place, and the cursed swaggering severity with
which you carried out your loyalty, by making unexpected domiciliary
visits to the houses of loyal but humane Protestant families, with the
expectation of finding a priest or a Papist under their protection: both
these, I say, have made you the most unpopular man in the county; and,
upon my soul, Sir Robert, I don't think there will be a man upon
the grand jury whose family you have not insulted by your inveterate
loyalty. No one, I tell! you, likes a persecutor. Still, I say, I'll try
what I can do with the grand jury. I'll see my friends and yours--if you
have any now; make out a list of them in a day or two--and you may rest
assured that I will leave nothing undone to extricate you."

"Thank you, Mr. Folliard; but do you know why I am here?"

"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