“This is Mr. Reilly, gentlemen; a firm and an honest Catholic, who, like ourselves, is suffering for his religion.”

“Mr. Reilly,” said the bishop, “it is good to suffer for our religion.”

“It is our duty,” replied Reilly, “when we are called upon to do so; but for my part, I must confess, I have no relish whatsoever for the honors of martyrdom.  I would rather aid it and assist it than suffer for it.”

The bishop gave a stem look at his friends, as much as to say:  “You hear! incipient heresy and treachery at the first step.”

“He’s more mad than the bishop,” thought Father Maguire; “in God’s name what will come next, I wonder?  Reilly’s blood, somehow, is up; and there they are looking at each other, like a pair o’ game cocks, with their necks stretched out in a cockpit—­when I was a boy I used to go to see them—­ready to dash upon one another.”

“Are you not now suffering for your religion?” asked the prelate.

“No,” replied Reilly, “it is not for the sake of my religion that I have suffered any thing.  Religion is made only a pretext for it; but it is not, in truth, on that account that I have been persecuted.”

“Pray, then, sir, may I inquire the cause of your persecution?”

“You may,” replied Reilly, “but I shall decline to answer you.  It comes not within your jurisdiction, but is a matter altogether personal to myself, and with which you can have no concern.”

Here a groan from the priest, which he could not suppress, was shivered off, by a tremendous effort, into a series of broken coughs, got up in order to conceal his alarm at the fatal progress which Reilly, he thought, was unconsciously making to his own ruin.

“Troth,” thought he, “the soldiers were nothing at all to what this will be.  There his friends would have found the body and given him a decent burial; but here neither friend nor fellow will know where to look for him.  I was almost the first man that took the oath to keep the existence of this place secret from all unless those that were suffering for their religion; and now, by denying that, he has me in the trap along with himself.”

A second groan, shaken out of its continuity into another comical shower of fragmental coughs, closed this dreary but silent soliloquy.

The bishop proceeded:  “You have been inveigled, young man, by the charms of a deceitful and heretical syren, for the purpose of alienating you from the creed of your forefathers.”

“It is false,” replied Reilly; “false, if it proceeded from the lips of the Pope himself; and if his lips uttered to me what you now have done, I would fling the falsehood in his teeth, as I do now in yours—­yes, if my life should pay the forfeit of it.  What have you to do with my private concerns?”

Reilly’s indignant and impetuous reply to the prelate struck all who heard it with dismay, and also with horror, when they bethought themselves of the consequences.