“What! to compromise a felony, and be transported himself. Thank you for nothing baronet; that's rather a blue look up. No, our only plan is to try and influence the grand jury to throw out the bills; but then, again, there are indictments against you to no end. Hastings' case is only a single one, and, even if he failed, it would not better your condition a whit. Under the late Administration we could have saved you by getting a packed jury; but that's out of the question now. All we can do, I think, is to get up a memorial strongly signed, supplicating the Lord Lieutenant to commute your sentence from hanging to transportation for life. I must confess, however, there is little hope even there. They will come down with their cursed reasoning and tell us that the rank and education of the offender only aggravate the offence; and that, if they allow a man so convicted to escape, in consequence of his high position in life, every humble man found guilty and executed for the same crime--is murdered. They will tell us it would be a prostitution of the prerogative of the Crown to connive at crime in the rich and punish it in the poor. And, again, there's the devil of it; your beggarly want of hospitality in the first place, and the cursed swaggering severity with which you carried out your loyalty, by making unexpected domiciliary visits to the houses of loyal but humane Protestant families, with the expectation of finding a priest or a Papist under their protection: both these, I say, have made you the most unpopular man in the county; and, upon my soul, Sir Robert, I don't think there will be a man upon the grand jury whose family you have not insulted by your inveterate loyalty. No one, I tell! you, likes a persecutor. Still, I say, I'll try what I can do with the grand jury. I'll see my friends and yours--if you have any now; make out a list of them in a day or two--and you may rest assured that I will leave nothing undone to extricate you.” “Thank you, Mr. Folliard; but do you know why I am here?” “To be sure I do.” “No, you don't, sir. William Reilly, the Jesuit and Papist, is the cause of it, and will be the cause of my utter ruin and ignominious death.” “How is that? Make it plain to me; only make that plain to me.” “He is the bosom friend of Hastings, and can sway him and move him and manage him as a father would a child, or, rather, as a child would a doting father. Reilly, sir, is at the bottom of this, his great object always having been to prevent a marriage between me and your beautiful daughter; I, who, after all, have done so much for Protestantism, am the victim of that Jesuit and Papist.”