to the girl's
face, and he stroked his thin, brown cheek reflectively. He recalled
the scene in the bog, Colonel John's courage, and his thought for his
servant. And at last, "I am not thinking," he said coolly, "that he
will betray me. I am sure--I think I am sure," he continued, correcting
himself, "that he will not. He is a heretic, but he is a good man."

Flavia's cheek flamed. She started back. "A good man!" she cried in a
voice audible half a hundred yards away.

Father O'Hara looked a little ashamed of himself; but he stood by his
guns. "A heretic, of course," he said. "But, I'm thinking, a good man.
At any rate, I'm not believing that he will inform against me."

As quickly as it had come, the colour fled from Flavia's face, and left
it cold and hard. She looked at the priest as she had never looked at a
priest of her Church before. "You must take your own course then," she
said. And with a gesture which he did not understand she turned from
him, and leaving him, puzzled and disconcerted, she went away into the
house.

A good man! Heaven and earth and the sea besides! A good man! Father
O'Hara was a fool! A fool!

CHAPTER XVII

THE LIMIT

If there was one man more sorry than another that the Morristown rising
had been nipped in the bud it was Luke Asgill. It stood to his credit
that, though he had never dared to cross Flavia's will, he had tried,
and honestly tried, to turn James McMurrough from the attempt. But even
while doing this, he had known--as he had once told James with bitter
frankness--that his interest lay in the other scale; he had seen that
had he attended to it only, he would not have dissuaded The McMurrough,
but, on the contrary, would have egged him on, in the assurance that
the failure of the plot would provide his one best chance of winning
Flavia. A score of times, indeed, he had pictured, and with rapture,
the inevitable collapse. In the visions of his head upon his bed he had
seen the girl turn to him in the wreck of things--it might be to save
her brother's life, it might be to save her tender feet from the stones
of foreign streets. And in the same dream he had seen himself standing
by her, alone against the world; as, to do him justice, he would have
stood, no matter how sharp the stress or great the cost.

He had no doubt that he would be able to save her--in spite of herself
and whatever her indiscretion. For he belonged to a class that has ever
owned inordinate po