“Mr. Folliard,” said the baronet, “is this true?”

“Is what true, Sir Robert?” said he sharply.

“Why, that Reilly and the Red Rapparee are both in Sligo jail?”

“It is true, Sir Robert; and it must be a cursed thing to be in jail for a capital crime.”

“Are you becoming penitent,” asked the other, “for bringing the laws of the land to bear upon the villain that would have disgraced, and might have ruined, your only daughter?”

The father’s heart was stung by the diabolical pungency of this question.

“Sir Robert,” said he, “we will hang him if it was only to get the villain out of the way; and if you will be here to-morrow at ten o’clock, the marriage must take place.  I’ll suffer no further nonsense about it; but, mark me, after the honeymoon shall have passed, you and she must come and reside here; to think that I could live without her is impossible.  Be here, then, at ten o’clock; the special license is ready, and I have asked the Rev. Samson Strong to perform the ceremony.  A couple of my neighbor Ashford’s daughters will act as bridesmaids, and I myself will give her away:  the marriage articles are drawn up, as you know, and there will be little time lost in signing them; and yet, it’s a pity to—­but no matter—­be here at ten.”

Whitecraft took his leave in high spirits.  The arrest and imprisonment of Reilly had removed the great impediment that had hitherto lain in the way of his marriage; but not so the imprisonment of the Red Rapparee.  The baronet regretted that that public and notorious malefactor had been taken out of his own hands, because he wished, as the reader knows, to make the delivering of him up to the Government one of the elements of his reconciliation to it.  Still, as matters stood, he felt on the whole gratified at what had happened.

Folliard, after the baronet had gone, knew not exactly how to dispose of himself.  The truth is, the man’s heart was an anomaly—­a series of contradictions, in which one feeling opposed another for a brief space, and then was obliged to make way for a new prejudice equally transitory and evanescent.  Whitecraft he never heartily liked; for though the man was blunt, he could look through a knave, and appreciate a man of honor, with a great deal of shrewd accuracy.  To be sure, Whitecraft was enormously rich, but then he was penurious and inhospitable, two vices strongly and decidedly opposed to the national feeling.

“Curse the long-legged scoundrel,” he exclaimed; “if he should beget me a young breed of Whitecrafts like himself I would rather my daughter were dead than marry him.  Then, on the other hand, Reilly; hang the fellow, had he only recanted his nonsensical creed, I could—­but then, again, he might, after marriage, bring her over to the Papists, and then, by the Boyne, all my immense property would become Roman Catholic.  By Strongbow, he’d teach the very rivers that run through it to sing Popish psalms in Latin:  he would.  However, the best way is to hang him out of the way, and when Jack Ketch has done with him, so has Helen.  Curse Whitecraft, at all events!”