" 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.
"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.
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