“No, I wouldn’t mind. There aren’t many I could ask to help us, or that I could take help from; but I am not that high in my turn I’d refuse it from you. Take it with you though, Miss Grace. Don’t leave it here. I could not keep it secret from the good man—we have never had anything separate, and he’d either be angry with me for taking it, or else he’d want it to spend on the law.”
“In that case I will not leave it,” said Grace emphatically; “only remember this one thing,—whilst I am alive and have a pound, you need never want. Bid me good-bye now, for I must go.”
“Good-bye,” answered Mrs. Scott, taking Grace’s hand in her own, after carefully wiping the latter on her apron; “God send you safe to England and back again!” and with this customary form of farewell, which, familiar as it is to those resident in Ireland, always strikes solemnly on the ear, Mrs. Scott suffered her visitor to depart, watching her retreating figure till it was lost to sight, and then returning to her seat and her occupation.
“And back again!” Grace repeated to herself, as she looked over the glory of land and water—hill and wood lying calm and beautiful under a flood of golden sunshine. “And back again! what will have happened, I wonder, by the time I return?”
CHAPTER III.
BREAKING THE ICE.
Were I to say that at first Miss Moffat neither admired the country nor liked the people of England, I should only be expressing the sentiments of an entire nation in the person of a single individual; other people may have met with Irish men and Irish women who took kindly to Saxon soil on the first intention, but for my own part I have still to see the recently imported Celt willing to admit there can be any good thing found in the land.
It is very curious to consider how rapidly educated English tourists take to Ireland—to the inhabitants, the brogue, the scenery, the whisky—and then to contrast with this the length of time required to acclimatize an Irish person of any rank to England and English ways. Safely, I think, it may be asserted that there is nothing on this side the channel, from the red-tiled roofs of picturesque old barns to the glories of the Row, which finds favour in Hibernian eyes. They may like England at last—many do—but they never like it at first.
To this rule Grace formed no exception. There was nothing she liked in the foreign land to which she had voluntarily exiled herself. Amongst her own country people, she even fancied Mrs. Hartley had changed, and changed for the worse, from the decided, incisive widow, whose tongue had been the terror and whose dress had been the envy of feminine Kingslough.
She was more conventional and less amusing, the young lady considered; but Mrs. Hartley’s latest surroundings presented no temptations to unconventionality, and it would have been extremely difficult to prove herself clever at the expense of the eminently dull and decorous people amongst whom her lot was now cast.
The style in which her friend lived was also at first a trial to Grace.