"Am I being watched?" thought Agnes.
One day, in early June, as Agnes entered the parlor, she found Reverend Silas Van de Lear there. At the sight of this good old man, the patriarch of Kensington, by whom she had been baptized and received into the communion, Agnes Wilt felt strongly moved, the more that in his eyes was a regard of sympathy just a little touched with doubt.
"My daughter!" exclaimed the old man, in his clear, practised articulation, "you are daily in my prayers!"
The tears came to Agnes, and as she attempted to wipe them away the good old gentleman drew her head to his shoulder.
"I cannot let myself think any evil of you, dear sister, in God's chastising providence," said the clergyman. "Among the angels, in the land that is awaiting me, I had expected to see the beautiful face which has so often encouraged my preaching, and looked up at me from Sabbath-school and church. You do not come to our meetings any more. My dear, let us pray together in your affliction."
The old man knelt in the parlor and raised his voice in prayer—a clear, considerate, judicial, sincere prayer, such as age and long authority gave him the right to address to heaven. He was not unacquainted with sorrow himself; his children had given him much concern, and even anguish, and in Calvin was his last hope. A thread of wicked commonplace ran through them all; his sterling nature in their composition was lost like a grain of gold in a mass of alloy. They had nothing ideal, no reverence, no sense of delicacy. Taking to his arms a face and form that pleased him, the minister had not ingrafted upon it one babe of any divinity; that coarser matrix received the sacred flame as mere mud extinguishes the lightning. He fell into this reminiscence of personal disappointment unwittingly, as in the process of his prayer he strove to comfort Agnes. The moment he did so the cold magistracy of the prayer ceased, and his voice began to tremble, and there ran between the ecclesiastic and his parishioner the electric spark of mutual grief and understanding.
The old man hesitated, and became choked with emotion.
As he stopped, and the pause was prolonged, Agnes herself, by a powerful inner impulsion, took up the prayer aloud, and carried it along like inspiration. She was not of the strong-minded type of women, rather of the wholly loving; but the deep afflictions of the past few months, working down into the crevices and cells of her nature, had struck the impervious bed of piety, and so deluged it with sorrow and the lonely sense of helplessness that now a cry like an appeal to judgment broke from her, not despair nor accusation, but an appeal to the very equity of God.
It arose so frankly and in such majesty, finding its own aptest words by its unconscious instinct, that the aged minister was presently aware of a preternatural power at his side. Was this woman a witch, genius, demon, or the very priestess of God, he asked.
The solemn prayer ranged into his own experience by that touch of nature which unlocks the secret spring of all, being true unto its own deep needs. The minister was swept along in the resistless current of the prayer, and listened as if he were the penitent and she the priest. As the petition died away in Agnes's physical exhaustion, the venerable man thought to himself: