"It is a great, beautiful terror, even as it is to-day," said Nellie breathlessly. "What a height we are above it! It makes me giddy only to look down?"
"Do not look, then," said Roger anxiously, "but rather turn inward toward yonder isle, which is only separated from the mainland by a narrow strip of water. There are cliffs upon that island which look westward over the ocean and rise eighteen hundred feet above it, and the inhabitants will tell you that, when the weather is calm enough, you can see from thence, at the setting of the sun, the 'Hy Brysail'—the enchanted isle, the 'Tir-na-n'oge,' or land of eternal youth and beauty, to which death and sorrow never come, and where (so the old legend tells us) a hundred years of this mortal life pass swiftly as a single day. Few, as you may well suppose, are the favored mortals who have ever reached it, and fewer still, if any, who have ever come back to tell the tale of their adventures."
"It is a pretty legend," said Nellie, straining her eyes over the ocean as earnestly as though she seriously expected to discover the fairy island of which he spoke floating on its bosom. "Have you ever really seen anything like land in that direction?"
"If you choose, we can go some of these days on a voyage of discovery," said Roger, smiling at her seriousness; "only, if we do find 'Hy-Brysail,' I warn you that we shall have to stay there. Such is the law by which adventurers to its shores are bound. It does not seem a hard law either, does it? Would you object to it. Mistress Netterville?' to be young and beautiful for ever! Sorrow forgotten as if it had never been, beneath the spells of that magic land!"
Nellie drew a long breath, and her blue eyes grew well-nigh black with suppressed feeling as she looked westward toward the ocean. But she did not answer.
"Well," he said, finding she would not speak, "will you try the adventure with me, or do you still prefer earth and its passing showers to this land of eternal sunshine?"
Nellie sighed—it almost seemed as if she were making a real choice; and when he playfully repeated, "Have you decided? which shall it be—this old kingdom of Grana Uaille or Tir-na-n'oge?" she quite seriously replied:
"Not Tir-na-n'oge, certainly; though a year ago, perhaps, I might have chosen otherwise. But youth and its sunshine is not real happiness, after all, although sometimes it looks very like it; and even if it were, there is something to me in a life of happiness, simple and unalloyed, less noble, and less like the choice of a soul predestined to eternity, than in one of sorrow bravely borne."
"Sorrow has done its work well for you, at all events," said Roger, moved to a higher feeling of reverence than, two minutes before, he would have thought it possible to have entertained for a creature so young and still so childish."
"Woe to the soul upon which it does it not, once that soul has been delivered to its guidance," Nellie answered softly, and almost as it were beneath her breath.