She heard a voice like the principal teacher's, say in a lapping, watery way, "Miss Byerly, what is the meaning of this? Your division is in disorder. Nobody has recited. Unless you are ill I must suspend you and call another teacher here."
"Help! I'm floating off upon the river. Save me! I drown! I drown!"
The scholars were all up and excited. The principal motioned another lady teacher to come, and laid Podge's head in the other's lap.
"She has been under great excitement," Podge heard the other lady say. "The Zane murder occurred in her family. Last night, I have been told, Miss Byerly refused Mr. Bunn, our principal school director, and a man of large means, who had long been in love with her."
"I heard it from his sister," said the other lady. "Mortified at her refusal, because confident that she would accept him, he sailed this day for Europe."
These were the last words Podge 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.