Byerly heard. Then it seemed that the
waters closed over her head.

* * * * *

Agnes, left alone in the homestead, had a few days of perfect relief,
except from anonymous letters and newspaper clippings delivered by mail.
That refined handwriting which had steadily poured out the venom of some
concealed hostility survived all other correspondence--delicate as the
graceful circles of the tiniest fish-hooks whose points and barbs enter
deepest in the flesh.

"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