Rachel grew more sad and strange than ever after this marriage. I think that Stanley was right, and that living in that solitary and darksome dell helped to make her hypochondriac. One evening Stanley Lake stood at her door. 'I was just thinking, dear Radie,' he said in his sweet low tones, which to her ear always bore a suspicion of mockery in them, 'how pretty you contrive to make this bright little garden at all times of the year--you have such lots of those evergreens, and ivy, and those odd flowers.' 'They call them _immortelles_ in France,' said Rachel, in a cold strange tone, 'and make chaplets of them to lay upon the coffin-lids and the graves.' 'Ah, yes, to be sure, I have seen them there and in Pere la Chaise--so they do; they have them in all the cemeteries--I forgot that. How cheerful; how very sensible. Don't you think it would be a good plan to stick up a death's-head and cross-bones here and there, and to split up old coffin-lids for your setting-sticks, and get old Mowlders, the sexton, to bury your roots, and cover them in with a "dust to dust," and so forth, and plant a yew tree in the middle, and stick those bits of painted board, that look so woefully like gravestones, all round it, and then let old Tamar prowl about for a ghost? I assure you, Radie, I think you, all to nothing, the perversest fool I ever encountered or heard of in the course of my life.' 'Well, Stanley, suppose you do, I'll not dispute it. Perhaps you are right,' said Rachel, still standing at the door of her little porch. 'Perhaps,' he repeated with a sneer; 'I venture to say, _most positively_, I can't conceive any sane reason for your refusing Dorcas's entreaty to live with us at Brandon, and leave this triste, and unwholesome, and everyway objectionable place.' 'She was very kind, but I can't do it.' 'Yes, you can't do it, simply because it would be precisely the most sensible, prudent, and comfortable arrangement you could possibly make; you _won't_ do it--but you can and will practise all the airs and fooleries of a bad melodrama. You have succeeded already in filling Dorcas's mind with surmise and speculation, and do you think the Gylingden people are either blind or dumb? You are taking, I've told you again and again, the very way to excite attention and gossip. What good can it possibly do you? You'll not believe until it happens, and when it does, you'd give your eyes you could undo it. It is so like you.' 'I have said how very kind I thought it of Dorcas to propose it. I can't explain to her all my reasons for declining; and to you I need not. But I cannot overcome my repugnance--and I won't try.' 'I wonder,' said Stanley, with a sly look of enquiry, 'that you who read the Bible--and a very good book it is no doubt--and believe in all sorts of things--' 'That will do, Stanley. I'm not so weak as you suppose.'