"Whom can this creature be?" asked Agnes, bringing up her strong mind from its trouble. "I can have made no such bitter enemy by any act of mine. A man would hardly pursue so light a purpose with such stability. There is more than jealousy in it; it is sincere hate, drawn, I should think, from a deep social or mental resentment, and enraged because I do not sink under my troubles. Yes, this must be a woman who believes me innocent but wishes my ruin. Some one, perhaps, who is sinning unsuspected, and, in her envy of another and purer one, gloats in the scandal which does not justly stain me. The anonymous letter," thought Agnes, "is a malignant form of conscience, after all!"
But life, as it was growing to be in the Zane house, was hardly worth living. Podge Byerly was broken down and dangerously ill at her mother's little house. All of Agnes's callers had dropped off, and she felt that she could no longer worship, except as a show, at Van de Lear's church; but this deprivation only deepened Agnes's natural devotion. Duff Salter saw her once, and oftener heard her praying, as the strong wail of it ascending through the house pierced even his ears.
"That woman," said Duff, "is wonderfully armed; with beauty, courage, mystery, witchery, she might almost deceive a God."
The theory that the house was haunted confirmed the other theory that a crime rested upon its inmates.
"Why should there be a ghost unless there had been a murder?" asked the average gossip and Fishtowner, to whom the marvellous was certain and the real to be inferred from it. Duff Salter believed in the ghost, as Agnes was satisfied; he had become unsocial and suspicious in look, and after two or three days of absence from the house, succeeding Podge's disappearance, entered it with his new servant.
Agnes did not see the servant at all for some days, though knowing that he had come. The cook said he was an accommodating man, ready to help her at anything, and of no "airs." He entered and went, the cook said, by the back gate, always wiped his feet at the door, and appeared like a person of not much "bringing up." One day Agnes had to descend to the kitchen, and there she saw a strange man eating with the cook; a rough person with a head of dark red hair and grayish red beard all round his mouth and under his chin. She observed that he was one-legged, and used a common wooden crutch on the side of the wooden leg. Two long scars covered his face, and one shaggy eyebrow was higher than the other.
"I axes your pardon," said the man; "me and cook takes our snack when we can, mum."
A day or two after Agnes passed the same man again at the landing on the stairway. He bowed, and said in his Scotch or Irish dialect,
"God bless ye, mum!"
Agnes thought to herself that she had not given the man credit for a certain rough grace which she now perceived, and as she turned back to look at him he was looking at her with a fixed, incomprehensible expression.