Major Sirr's ill-timed mirth rankled in Robert's bosom. He was not worth taking, then! Yet Lord Clare had deemed him dangerous enough to justify expulsion from Alma Mater. Lord Clare. What did he intend doing with this last haul of the net? That document which Sirr had picked up so carefully would provide him with such a list of country members as would satisfy for awhile even his rapacious gullet. Would he hang them all, or be content, for the present, to cage them as he did before? No. Times were changed since then. He was deliberately scourging the land with scorpions. No mercy might be expected at his hands. Was Tom Emmett to be hanged? Was he to suffer an ignominious death before he had had time to strike a blow for motherland? That would be too hard. It must be prevented somehow. It was providential that the younger brother should not have been kidnapped too. It was a miraculous intervention, for duty shone clear before him. He must obtain the release of the patriots, even if to do so he should have to kneel at King George's feet. Intercession must be made. At the thought the lad's courage rose. He would go and consult Curran on the subject. As he hurried on down Dame Street, he strove to comb his tangled thoughts into some symmetry. Who could the Judas be who wore his mask so deftly? Sirr's Battalion of Testimony was spreading to huge proportions; the Staghouse by Kilmainham, where the wolves dwelt, could scarcely hold them now. Doubtless there was a secret service as well as this public one so insolently flaunted. 'Of whom does it consist?' Robert kept asking himself. 'Of whom? The friends of our hearts--the wives of our bosoms. It is awful to think how, when a country is well stirred up, the mud will rise to the surface!' Then, ruminating as he went, he thought of Terence, and murmured mournfully, 'Could it be he? I pray not, for I love him as a brother!' A shadow lay stretched before him. With a shudder he turned aside to avoid the effigy of a good man, who by a singular caprice of history has been elected high-priest of a mean purblindness, which he above all others would himself have most abhorred. William III.'s effigy, in its incongruous classical costume, is no whit more contemptible than some of his admirers have tried to make his character. But such is the way of the world. We set up a pole, and drape it with our own sentiments, then kneel down to worship, crying, 'How perfect is our idol!' Of course it is; for the drapery is woven, as a spider's web is, from out of our own bowels; what can be so perfect as that we have ourselves created, however loosely it may hang on the support we have selected to bear it?