replied Reilly, with
a smile; "but I should be glad to know why you introduce this subject to
me?"

"To you?" replied Folliard; "why, who the devil else should or could I
introduce it to with such propriety? Here now are two religions; one's
not sixpence better nor worse than the other. Now, you belong to one of
them, and because you do you're here snug and fast. I say, then, I have
a proposal to make to you: you are yourself in a difficulty--you
have placed me in a difficulty--and you have placed poor Helen in a
difficulty--which, if any thing happens you, I think will break her
heart, poor child. Now you can take her, yourself, and me, out of all
our difficulties, if you have only sense enough to shove over from the
old P---- to the young P----. As a Protestant, you can marry Helen,
Reilly--but as a Papist, never! and you know the rest; for if you are
obstinate, and blind to your own interests, I must do my duty."

"Will you allow me to ask, sir, whether Miss Folliard is aware of this
mission of yours to me?"

"She aware! She never dreamt of it; but I have promised to tell her the
result after dinner to-day."

"Well, sir," replied Reilly, "will you allow me to state to you a few
facts?"

"Certainly; go on."

"In the first place, then, such is your daughter's high and exquisite
sense of integrity and honor that, if I consented to the terms you
propose, she would reject me with indignation and scorn, as she ought
to do. There, then, is your project for accomplishing my selfish and
dishonest apostacy given to the winds. Your daughter, sir, is too pure
in all her moral feelings, and too noble-minded, to take to her arms a
renegade husband--a renegade, too, not from conviction, but from selfish
and mercenary purposes."

"Confound the thing, this is but splitting hairs, Reilly, and talking
big for effect. Speak, however, for yourself; as for Helen, I know very
well that, in spite of your heroics and her's, she'd be devilish glad
you'd become a Protestant and marry her."

"I am sorry to say, sir, that you don't know your own daughter; but as
for me, Mr. Folliard, if one word of your's, or of her's, could place
me on the British throne, I would not abandon my religion. Under no
circumstances would I abandon it; but least of all, now that it is
so barbarously persecuted by its enemies. This, sir, is my final
determination."

"But do you know the alternative?"

"No, sir, nor do you."

"Don't I, faith? Why, the