"And why'll they 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.