"Make it ten guineas, my Lord," shouted the Roman Catholic lawyer, who had previously interrupted Serjeant Parry by saying "We will have money, we will have money." "There shall be an end of this, gentlemen," said the judge; "I give a verdict for forty shillings," and he walked out of court. And so this painful ordeal came to an end. It was not till afterwards that I was aware that the verdict of forty shillings obliged me to pay the costs of both sides—£199 to my lawyer, and £293 to the Roman Catholic lawyer, which was afterwards reduced by a taxing-master to £207, 9s. 1d.

As soon as we left the court and returned to the hotel, our solicitor came in, and, before all those of our family who were present, declared how, by my desire, he had repeatedly offered to withdraw the letter to Mrs. Montgomery, but how money was always demanded as its price, and how money was proved throughout to be the only real object of those who brought the action. In looking back, therefore, upon the whole of this terrible affair, I only see three ways in which the trial could have been avoided:—

1. If Miss Stanley had had the courage to go openly to Mrs. Monteith and Lady Lothian, and say boldly that she, a Roman Catholic, was the cause of my writing the letter to Mrs. Montgomery; that as to the "report," I acted entirely and exclusively on information which she gave; that at first I had hesitated to do as she wished, but that she had continued to urge it; and that she, a Catholic, had looked over the letter before it was sent, and begged me not to alter a word of it.

2. If my solicitor had acted upon the one piece of advice given by Mr. Phelps, and weeks before the trial had requested Pierina to deliver her "message," we should then have known that the message was not given to her except through the medium of the servants, and therefore that by English law the wording of the letter was indefensible.

3. If my solicitor had been less supine in summoning witnesses—if he had at once subpœnaed Mary Laffam and the other maids on our side, and had also summoned my Aunt Fitz-Gerald, who would have been willing and glad to give her evidence, and whose very appearance would have made Francis shrink from allowing the Roman Catholic confederacy to continue the trial.

Mary Stanley and I went early to the Guildford station to wait for the train which was to take us back to London. We had not been long on the platform before all the Roman Catholic party emerged upon it. I went at once to meet and pass them, thinking it better at once to establish the terms on which we were to remain through life. The Mother Pierina alone lingered behind the rest, and, with streaming eyes and outstretched hands, came towards me. "Oh, I thought it would have been for peace," she said. I could not refuse to take her hand, when Mr. Monteith, turning round, roughly seized her by the shoulder and led her away, saying, "Reverend Mother, I must insist that you do not speak to that ... person." Afterwards, when she was entering the railway carriage after the others, Mrs. Dunlop seized Pierina and pushed her out of the carriage, almost throwing her down upon the platform, and slammed the carriage-door in her face. Admiral Dunlop immediately forced his wife to get out of the carriage and apologise to the Reverend Mother. I did not know till long afterwards the reason of Mrs. Dunlop's violence, which was the persistence with which Pierina throughout that day had dwelt upon the wicked unfairness of having the trial in the absence of Mary Laffam, who was the witness really responsible for all that had been said. On August 19 Mary Stanley wrote to me:—

"Yesterday I saw Sister Pierina. She said how extremely grieved she had been for you. She said the lawyer on the Catholic side read the evidence to all the party at Guildford, and that she then expressed her dissent, saying that it was not in accordance with what Mary Laffam had said to her and others, and that in justice to you, she, Laffam, ought to be present. All through that day (which she said was most dreadful to her) she asserted and reasserted this, and that you were not fairly dealt with, and to me she complained sadly of the un-christian spirit in which the affair had been carried on: Mrs. Dunlop, she said, was far the worst.

"Pierina denies nothing. She could only say, when asked about the message, that none was given directly to her, and that to her your sister had only said, 'Tell Francis that he has been the cause of my death.' She was forbidden to say to whom the message was given. So far from going over to the other side, she was at war with them the whole day, and told me she did not believe any of that party would ever come near her again; and I met Monsignor Paterson on Sunday, who told me that Mrs. Dunlop had been to him to complain bitterly of her."

Afterwards the feeling of the conspirators, especially of Mrs. Dunlop and Mrs. Montgomery, became so violent against the Mother Pierina (on account of her persisting in the injustice of the trial), that they not only stopped their own subscriptions to her charities, but induced others to do so, and eventually, by the interest of Mr. Monteith with Monsignor Talbot and other Roman authorities, they brought about her recall and persecuted her out of England altogether.

On August 7, Monsignor Paterson wrote a long letter to Mary Stanley, explanatory of his conduct in the affair. It contained the following remarkable passage:—