Lady Venniker spoke once of the future unseen world. Her daughter was not with her then. Her thoughts dwelt much upon it in the silent night watches. That there was such a world she could no more doubt than that there was this world. ‘As life goes on,’ she said, ‘and the beloved ones whom we have known pass one by one behind the veil, so that we have more and more friends in that world and fewer in this, we come to feel that we should be more at home there than on earth. I have been sometimes very near to that world--my life was given up--but God spared me. One little girl of ours, younger than Ethel, He has taken to Himself. I tremble sometimes for Ethel; she looks very delicate, don’t you think so, Gerald?’ He did think so, but he knew not then why the thought was so painful to him. He tried to disguise it, saying that Miss Venniker seemed stronger than she was when he first came to Helmsbury--she could walk further--he hoped she would soon be quite strong--many persons outgrew the delicacy of their youth. Lady Venniker put out her hand and pressed Gerald’s tenderly. This conversation took place just before Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley went back for their last term to St. Anselm’s. After that term they would be parted, and their lives would flow in different channels, except for occasional meetings at Helmsbury or elsewhere; for Gerald, as the reader knows, was going to Balliol, and Harry was destined for the army. It was therefore with solemnised feelings, as standing on the verge of a dreaded inevitable change in their lives, that they went back together to St. Anselm’s. Since Gerald Eversley’s success at Balliol and the holiday that rewarded it, he had come to hold a different position in the eyes of the school. To say that he was generally popular would be misleading. He still lived very much to himself. Boys would still remark to one another that they could not understand what ‘Venniker saw to be so fond of in that fellow Eversley.’ But they regarded Gerald, with a sincere, though distant, respect, as a boy who was unlike themselves, and in some sense their superior, who possessed such attainments and accomplishments as they could not aspire to, and who would probably be remembered at St. Anselm’s when they were forgotten.