The English descendants of Ireland's first invaders had, in fact, as years rolled by, and even while proudly asserting their own claims as Englishmen, so thoroughly identified themselves both by intermarriages and the adoption of language, dress, and manners with the Celtic natives of the soil that the latter, ever ready, too ready for their own interest perhaps, to be won by kindness, had ended by transferring to them the clannish feeling once given to their own rulers, and fought in the days we speak of under the standard of a De Burgh or a Fitzgerald as heartily and bitterly against Cromwell's soldiers as if an O'Neil or a MacMurrough had led them to the combat. To Nellie Netterville, therefore, the sympathy and indignation of old Grannie seemed quite as much a matter of course as if the blue blood coursing through her veins had been derived from a Celtic chieftain instead of from an old Norman baron of the days of King Henry. Nellie was, moreover, connected with the old woman by a tie which in those days was as strong, and even stronger, than that of race; for the English of the Pale had adopted in its most comprehensive sense the Irish system of fosterage, and Grannie having acted as foster-mother to Nellie's father, was, to all intents and purposes, as devoted to the person of his daughter as if she had been in very deed a grandchild of her own. But natural as such sympathy might have seemed, and soothing as no doubt it was to her wounded feelings, it was yet clothed in such dangerous language that it had an effect upon Nellie the very opposite of that which, under any other circumstances, it might have been expected to produce. It recalled her to the necessity of self-possession, and conscious that she must command her own feelings if she hoped to control those of her warm-hearted dependent, she deliberately wiped the tears from her eyes, and rose from the settle on which she had flung herself only a few minutes before, in an uncontrolled agony of grief. {85} When she felt that she had thoroughly mastered her own emotion, she drew old Grannie toward her, made her sit down on the stool she herself had just vacated, and kneeling down beside her, said in a tone of command which contrasted, oddly yet prettily enough, with the child-like attitude assumed for the purpose of giving it: "You must not say such things. Grannie. I forbid it! Now and for ever I forbid it! You must not say such things. They can neither help us nor save us sorrow, and they might cost your life, old woman, if any evil-designing person heard them."