"He is faint for want of food," said Nellie hastily; "we have been wandering all day among the hills, and he has not broken his fast since morning."
Roger did not answer, but signing to her to support Lord Netterville, he went straight to some invisible cranny in the walls of the hut, and drew thence a bottle of strong cordial. Pouring a little of this into a broken mug, he made the old man swallow it, and then stood beside him, anxiously watching the result. Happily it was favorable—in a few minutes Lord Netterville revived, the color returned to his wan cheek, and turning to Nellie, he asked her, in a half-whisper, "if supper would soon be ready?" Shyly, and blushing scarlet, Nellie nodded an affirmative, and forgetting all her previous shame in anxiety for her grandfather, she was about to resume her office as cook, when, with a half-smile on his face, Roger Moore put her quietly aside.
"Nay, Mistress Netterville, remember that I am master here, and that I forbid you to lay hands upon that fish? I have always been cook in my own proper person to the establishment, and I cannot allow you to supersede me in the office."
"Forgive me!" said Nellie, tears starting to her eyes, and half fancying in her confusion that he was angry in earnest. "I could not help it, for he was starving."
"Do not misunderstand me, I entreat you," said Roger, in a voice of deep and real feeling; "I should be a brute if I objected to anything you have or could have done; I only meant that I objected to your continuing in that office; for so long as the daughter of my old colonel is under my roof, (even though it be but a poor mud sheeling,) she shall do no work, with my good-will, unfit for the hands of a princess." He busied himself while speaking in drawing forth, from that same recess in which he had found the cordial, some thin oaten cakes, a few wooden platters, and one or two knives and spoons of such massive silver, that Nellie could not help thinking they were as much out of keeping with the rest of the furniture as Roger himself appeared to be with the hut, of which he was doing the honors in such simple and yet such courtly fashion. He would not even let her hold the platter upon which he placed the fish as he took it from the embers, and he himself then brought it to Lord Netterville, and pressed him, as tenderly as if he had been a child, to partake of this impromptu supper.
The old man yielded, nothing loath, and so, indeed, did his grandchild; for, though very fair to look at, no goddess was poor Nellie, but a young and growing girl with the healthy appetite of sixteen. She accepted, therefore, Roger's invitation without the smallest affectation of reluctance, and sitting down on the floor beside her grandfather, shared the contents of his platter with innocent and undisguised enjoyment. With all her sense and courage, she was as yet in many things a perfect child, yielding as easily as a child might do to the first ray of sunshine that brightened on her path, and accepting the happiness of the present moment as unrestrainedly as if never even suspecting the shadows that were lurking in her future. Now, therefore, that she felt her grandfather was in safe and helpful keeping, she threw off the sense of responsibility which had weighed her down for months, and became almost gay. Color rose to her wasted cheek, light sparkled in her eyes, and she responded to Roger's efforts to make her feel comfortable and at home, with such innocent and unbounded faith in his wish and power to befriend them, that he vowed an inward vow never to forsake her, but to guard her, as if she had been in very deed his sister, through the trials and dangers of her unprotected exile. When their meal was over, and while her grandfather slumbered in the quiet warmth of the peat-fire, she told Roger Moore her story, simply and briefly as she might have told it to a brother, beginning at her departure from her ancestral home, and ending with her encounter with the English strangers among the mountains.
"It is Major Hewitson," said Roger, "in whose favor I have been despoiled of my old home. Major Hewitson and his pretty daughter 'Ruth,' as he chooses to call her, in order to blot out the fact that her name is Henrietta, and that she had a popish queen for her godmother. She forgets it not herself, however," he added, with a smile; "for her mother was of noble race, and they say that she is a true cavalier at heart, and pines like a caged bird in the network of demure fanaticism which her father has twined around her."
"She has a lovely face and a kind and honest heart, for certain," said Nellie. "She knows you also, now I think of it; for she it was who directed me to this hut, with a hint that I should here find a friend."
"Did she?" said Roger, with genuine fervour. "Nay, then, for that one good deed I needs must pardon her, that she, or her father for her, have robbed me of my inheritance. And now I think of it," he added, with a touch of sly malice in his smile, "you also, if you came hither to seek land, must have been bound on the same errand; for both these baronies, 'Umhall uaghtragh' and 'Umhall ioghtragh,' is the country of the O'Mailly's, and, in right of my grandmother, my own."