During the remainder of the holidays Gerald Eversley attended the services in church regularly, and no word upon religion passed between his father and himself. Mrs. Eversley was constant in the performance of ‘good works.’ She remarked more than once that Gerald was ‘getting very dull.’ CHAPTER IX LAST DAYS AT ST. ANSELM’S One consolation Gerald Eversley possessed amidst the trials of which the last chapter has afforded a specimen. It lay in his visits to Helmsbury. Since the time of Harry Venniker’s illness it had become an almost understood thing that he should pay a visit to Helmsbury during all holidays. Lady Venniker’s tender heart had not lost the sense of gratitude for the sympathy he had shown when Harry was so near to the gates of the grave. He had become almost one of the family. He was permitted to enter into their intimate thoughts, and to tell them his own. It is true that Harry was unaware of his friend’s religious doubts and difficulties, nor would he have been able to appreciate them if he had been aware of them. His was not a nature that troubled itself about such things, and he would have been likely to dismiss speculations of a sceptical kind upon the Being of God and His relation to the souls and consciences of men as being, in his rough boyish phraseology, ‘all rot.’ But Lady Venniker, with true womanly instinct, divined that Gerald was not so happy in his mind as he used to be, that his unhappiness was occasioned by the stress of spiritual conflict, and that his spiritual conflict was in some way embittered by the circumstances of his home. Not that Gerald ever referred in censorious language to his home. On the contrary, he spoke of his early days at Kestercham as the happiest in his life, and of his father as the best man whom he had ever known.