"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." 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. "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."