WYLDER'S HAJVD
91
prevent. He has left the army, Tamar, and I don't know
what his plans are."
"Ah ! poor child; he was always foolish and changea-
ble, and a deal too innocent for them wicked officer-
gentlemen; and I'm glad he's not among them any longer
to learn bad ways — I am."
So, the drawing-room being prepared, Rachel bid Ta-
mar and little Margery good-night, and the sleepy little
handmaid stumped off to her bed; and white old Tamar,
who had not spoken so much for a month before, put on
her solemn round spectacles, and by her dipt candle read
her chapter in the ponderous Bible she had thumbed so
well, and her white lips told over the words as she read
them in silence.
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 down-
ward slant in the near woodland, and a denser back-ground
of forest rising at the other side, and to-night mistily gild-
ed by the yellow moonbeams, 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 soli-
tudes, lost in haunted darkness in every direction but one,
and there massed in vaporous and discolored foliage, hard-
ly more distinct, or less solemn.
"Poor old Tamar says her prayers, and reads her Bi-
ble; I wish / could. How often I wish it. That good,
Bimple Vicar — how unlike his brother — is wiser, per-