Home, after all, is home be it ever so homely; and the tones and the voices familiar to childhood sound sweet after absence, let those tones and voices lack refinement though they may.
Grace had outgrown her prejudice against the English as affected. She had learned that their accent was as genuine and natural as the rougher tongue of her native land; but still just as a Londoner, coming south from the Land o’ Cakes, thanks God when he reaches Carlisle to hear again something approaching a civilized language, so her heart warmed at sound of the familiar intonation. She was home again; she was amongst her own country people; she was no longer lost in the great country of England; she was a person of importance once more; she had ceased to be a princess in disguise,—back in the old familiar places, she was Miss Moffat of Bayview again.
From the moment she set foot in Dublin, she recognized that fact; and once for all I may as well state, it was pleasant to her. She had been but one of many in England; she was a person of importance in Ireland. She had learned much near the head-quarters of civilisation, but she had not learned to be indifferent to the prestige given by wealth and rank and being well known by repute even beyond her county.
These weaknesses, which add so much to happiness, but which usually develope themselves later in life, were with Grace an integral part of her nature. She was of the soil; she was Irish and she loved everything Irish. There might be things in the country she could wish improved, but still the place was home to her. And Grace’s heart swelled and her eyes filled with tears as she heard the brogue floating around her, and those persuasive tones which in Dublin always seem addressed only to one person, and that the listener, fell upon her ear.
Dirty, picturesque, polite, plausible, unsuccessful, they were her countrymen and countrywomen; and for a moment, Grace, in the excitement of her return, forgot the errand which had brought her back, and said to Mr. Nicholson in an access of enthusiasm,—
“How delightful all this is after England!”
“It is very kind of you to say so, Miss Moffat,” he replied. “For my part, I think London is the only place worth living in on earth.”
“Oh! fie,” exclaimed Grace, “and you an Irishman!”
“It is precisely because I am an Irishman that I say so,” was the reply. “I have met with many English people who believe they should like always to reside in Dublin.”
“I never have,” and Grace sighed when she thought of Mrs. Hartley’s openly expressed opinions.