y be safer there than in the house?" Uncle Ulick asked
suspiciously. He looked from one speaker to another with a baffled
face, trying to read their minds. He was sure that they meant more than
they said.

"Oh, for the good reason!" the young man returned contemptuously.
"Isn't all the world passing the door upstairs? And what more easy than
to open it?"

Cammock's eyes met the Bishop's. "The tower'll be best," he said.
"Devil a doubt of it! Draw off the people, and let them be taken there,
and a guard set. We've matters of more importance to discuss now. This
gathering to-morrow, to raise the country--what's the time fixed for
it?"

But Flavia, who had listened with a face of perplexity, interposed.
"Still, he is my prisoner, is he not?" she said wistfully. "And if I
answer for him?"

"By your leave, ma'am," Cammock replied, with decision, "one word.
Women to women's work! I'll let no woman weave a halter for me!"

The room echoed low applause. And Flavia was silent.

CHAPTER XI

A MESSAGE FOR THE YOUNG MASTER

James McMurrough was young, but he was a slave to as few of the
generous ambitions of youth as any man of his years. At heart he cared
little for his country, and nothing for his Faith--which indeed he had
been ready to barter for an allowance, and a certain succession. He
cared only for himself; and but for the resentment which the provisions
of his grandfather's will had bred in him, he would have seen the Irish
race in Purgatory, and the Roman faith in a worse place, before he
would have risked a finger to right the one or restore the other. Even
under the influence of that resentment, that bitterness, he had come
into the conspiracy with but half a heart; without enthusiasm, and with
an eye not so much to its ultimate success as to the gain he might make
out of it in the meantime.

Once embarked, however, on the enterprise, vanity, the failing of light
minds, and particularly of the Celtic mind, swept him onward. The night
which followed Colonel Sullivan's arrest was a night long remembered at
Morristown--a night to uplift the sanguine and to kindle the
short-sighted; nor was it a wonder that the young chief--as he strode
among his admiring tenants, his presence greeted, when he entered, with
Irish acclamations, and his skirts kissed, when he passed, by devoted
kernes--sniffed the pleasing incense, and trod the ground to the
measure of imagined music. He felt himself a greater man this ni