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.
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