Roger gazed upon her silently. It seemed as if she were changing beneath his very eyes from a bright, impulsive child into a woman of deep and earnest feeling—a woman in every fibre of her fine, strong nature—and yet still in the untried freshness of her sixteen years as innocent and confiding as a child. "Then you prefer a happiness which would bring with it the zest of contrast?" he added, as if to prove her further.
"I would prefer, at all events, a happiness founded upon duty," she answered gravely; and then, as if half-ashamed of her own earnestness, she asked him lightly:
"Is it not strange to find these floating traditions of a paradise of peace and plenty among a people so completely bereft of both as these poor creatures, by their very condition as a conquered race, must necessarily be?"
"For that very reason!" he answered quickly; "for that very reason! Men despised as savages and treated as wild beasts, will either brood over schemes of real vengeance or soothe themselves with dreams of unreal bliss. Is it wonderful, therefore, that these poor people, with their dreamy and imaginative natures, should sometimes look wistfully over the broad ocean, and fancy they see a land where (if once only it could be reached) flowers, and joy, and eternal sunshine, would console them for the misery endured among these barren rocks, in which they have been forced by their enemies to seek—I was going to say, a home—it would have been far more correct to have said—a prison?"
"Nay, but now it is you that are unjust," said Nellie, smiling—"unjust to this fair land you live in. The kingdom of Grana Uaille can in no sense of the word be called a prison; and even were it ten times less beautiful than it is, to me it would still remain the one bright memory left me to look back to in this great year of sorrow."
Roger turned quickly round, but Nellie met his eye with such a look of frank candor and unconsciousness as to the possibility of any hidden meaning being attachable to her words, that he felt tacitly rebuked beneath it, and merely said:
"Ay; but, Mistress Netterville, I was talking of a home."
"Home!" said Nellie softly—"home, after all, is but the place where the heart garners up its treasures. These were almost the last words my dear mother said to me, and now I feel their truth; for if she were but once more at my side, the barrenest island in Clew Bay would become to me, I think, at once as home-like almost and dear as Netterville itself."
Again Roger seemed on the point of saying something, but again he checked himself and was silent.
Nellie saw the flush upon his brow, and interpreted it her own way.