‘Are you so certain that no innocent men might be brought to the scaffold?’ asked the priest mildly.
‘No, I am not. I take it, as the world goes, very few of us go through life without some injustice or another. I’d do my best not to hang the fellows who didn’t deserve it, but I own I’d be much more concerned about the millions who wanted to live peaceably than the few hundred rapscallions that were bent on troubling them.’
‘I must say, sir,’ said the priest, ‘I am much more gratified to know that you are a Lieutenant of Lancers in Austria than a British Minister in Downing Street.’
‘I have little doubt myself,’ said the other, laughing, ‘that I am more in my place; but of this I am sure, that if we were as mealy-mouthed with our Croats and Slovacks as you are with your Fenians, Austria would soon go to pieces.’
‘There is, however, a higher price on that man Donogan’s head than Austria ever offered for a traitor,’ said Miller.
‘I know how you esteem money here,’ said Gorman, laughing. ‘When all else fails you, you fall back upon it.’
‘Why did I know nothing of these sentiments, young man, before I asked you under my roof?’ said Miss Betty, in anger.
‘You need never to have known them now, aunt, if these gentlemen had not provoked them, nor indeed are they solely mine. I am only telling you what you would hear from any intelligent foreigner, even though he chanced to be a liberal in his own country.’
‘Ah, yes,’ sighed the priest: ‘what the young gentleman says is too true. The Continent is alarmingly infected with such opinions as these.’
‘Have you talked on politics with young Kearney?’ asked Miller.