It was a small house, this Redman's Farm, but very silent, for all that, when the day's work was over; and very solemn, too, the look-out from the window among the colonnades of tall old trees, on the overshadowed earth, and through them into deepest darkness; the complaining of the lonely stream far down is the only sound in the air. There was but one imperfect vista, looking down the glen, and this afforded no distant view--only a downward slant in the near woodland, and a denser background of forest rising at the other side, and to-night mistily gilded by the yellow moon-beams, the moon herself unseen. Rachel had opened her window-shutters, as was her wont when the moon was up, and with her small white hands on the window-sash, looked into the wooded solitudes, lost in haunted darkness in every direction but one, and there massed in vaporous and discoloured foliage, hardly more distinct, or less solemn. 'Poor old Tamar says her prayers, and reads her Bible; I wish _I_ could. How often I wish it. That good, simple vicar--how unlike his brother--is wiser, perhaps, than all the shrewd people that smile at him. He used to talk to me; but I've lost that--yes--I let him understand I did not care for it, and so that good influence is gone from me--graceless creature. No one seemed to care, except poor old Tamar, whether I ever said a prayer, or heard any good thing; and when I was no more than ten years old, I refused to say my prayers for her. My poor father. Well, Heaven help us all.' So she stood in the same sad attitude, looking out upon the shadowy scene, in a forlorn reverie. Her interview with Dorcas remained on her memory like an odd, clear, half-horrible dream. What a dazzling prospect it opened for Stanley; what a dreadful one might it not prepare for Dorcas. What might not arise from such a situation between Stanley and Mark Wylder, each in his way a worthy representative of the ill-conditioned and terrible race whose blood he inherited? Was this doomed house of Brandon never to know repose or fraternity? Was it credible? Had it actually occurred, that strange confession of Dorcas Brandon's? Could anything be imagined so mad--so unaccountable? She reviewed Stanley in her mind's eye. She was better acquainted, perhaps, with his defects than his fascinations, and too familiar with both to appreciate at all their effect upon a stranger. 'What can she see in him? There's nothing remarkable in Stanley, poor fellow, except his faults. There are much handsomer men than he, and many as amusing--and he with no estate.' She had heard of charms and philtres. How could she account for this desperate hallucination?