'You know, Radie, I'm a Sadducee and that sort of thing does not trouble me the least in the world. It is a little cold here. May we go into the drawing-room? You can't think how I hate this--house. We are always unpleasant in it.' This auspicious remark he made taking off his hat, and placing it and his cane on her work-table. But this was not a tempestuous conference by any means. I don't know precisely what they talked about. I think it was probably the pros and cons of that migration to Brandon, against which Rachel had pronounced so firmly. 'I can't do it, Stanley. My motives are unintelligible to you, I know, and you think me obstinate and stupid; but, be I what I may, my objections are insurmountable. And does it not strike you that my staying here, on the contrary, would--would tend to prevent the kind of conversation you speak of?' 'Not the least, dear Radie--that is, I mean, it could have no possible effect, unless the circumstances were first supposed, and then it could be of no appreciable use. And your way of life and your looks--for both are changed--are likely, in a little prating village, where every human being is watched and discussed incessantly, to excite conjecture; that is all, and that is _every thing_.' It had grown dark while Stanley sat in the little drawing-room, and Rachel stood on her doorstep, and saw his figure glide away slowly into the thin mist and shadow, and turn upward to return to Brandon, by that narrow ravine where they had held rendezvous with Mark Wylder, on that ill-omened night when trouble began for all. To Rachel's eyes, that disappearing form looked like the moping spirit of guilt and regret, haunting the scene of the irrevocable. When Stanley took his leave after one of these visits--stolen visits, somehow, they always seemed to her--the solitary mistress of Redman's Farm invariably experienced the nervous reaction which follows the artificial calm of suppressed excitement. Something of panic or horror, relieved sometimes by a gush of tears--sometimes more slowly and painfully subsiding without that hysterical escape. She went in and shut the door, and called Tamar. But Tamar was out of the way. She hated that little drawing-room in her present mood--its associations were odious and even ghastly; so she sat herself down by the kitchen fire, and placed her pretty feet--cold now--upon the high steel fender, and extended her cold hands towards the embers, leaning back in her rude chair.