"I wish I could leave everybody happy behind me when I go away."
"Are you going soon?"
"I am going at once," wrote Duff Salter with a sudden decision. "I am not trusted by anybody here, and my work is over."
Agnes sat a little while in pain and wistfulness. Finally she wrote:
"There is but one thing which prevents our perfect trust in you; it is your distrust of us."
"I am distrustful—too much so," answered, in writing, the deaf man. "A little suspicion soon overspreads the whole nature, and yet, I think, one can be generous even with suspicion. Among the disciples were a traitor, a liar, a coward, and a doubter; but none upbraid the last, poor Thomas, and he is sainted in our faith. Do you know that suspicion made me deaf? Yes; if we mock Nature with distrust, she stops our ears. Do you not remember what happened to Zacharias, the priest? He would not believe the angel who announced that his wife would soon become a mother, and for his unbelief was stricken dumb!"
The deaf guest had either stumbled into this illustration, or written it with full design. He looked at Agnes, and the pale and purple colors came and went upon her face as she bent her body forward over the table. Duff Salter arose and spoke with that lost voice, like one in a vacuum, while he folded his tablet.
"Agnes," he said, "it has been cruel to a man of such a sceptical soul as mine to educate him back from the faith he had acquired to the unfaith he had tried to put behind him. Why did you do it? The suppression of the truth is never excusable. The secret you might have scattered with a word, when suspicion started against you, is now diffused through every family and rendezvous in Kensington."
She looked miserable enough, and still received the stab of her guest's magisterial tongue like an affliction from heaven.
"I had also become infected with this imputation," continued Duff Salter. "All things around you looked sinister for a season. A kind Providence has dispelled these black shadows, and I see you now the victim of an immeasurable mistake. Your weakness and another's obstinacy have almost ruined you. I shall save you with a cruel hand; let the remorse be his who hoped to outlive society and its natural suspicions by a mere absence."