Seaford in one of his morning walks over the farm. Mr. Eversley himself she treated with a respectful delicacy which won its way to his affection. She entered eagerly into all the affairs of the parish. She begged leave to go with him on his visits to his sick people, saying how much she was in the habit of paying such visits, as her mother’s representative, at Helmsbury; she was even to be seen walking at his side and, in spite of his repeated protest, carrying a basin of soup to a poor woman who had just been confined. She volunteered to take a part in the choir at church; and the villagers, who had been duly apprised of her rank and title by Mrs. Eversley, listened in open-mouthed admiration to her sweet voice, and said it seemed to them as if they had heard a voice from a better world. Mr. Eversley found to his delight that she loved her Saviour. It was enough for him; he did not ask if she had been ‘converted,’ but he spoke of her afterwards as ‘an elect soul.’ Perhaps Ethel Venniker did not need ‘conversion;’ there are some souls that do not seem to need it. But nothing awoke in Mr. Eversley’s heart such fervent satisfaction, nothing was to him such a subject of pious and devout thanksgiving, as her evidently strong spiritual influence upon Gerald. If there had been any roughness, any cynicism noticeable in his manner during the dark days of his doubtings, it disappeared when she was at his side. The old simplicity of faith returned to him, or was as if it returned. It happened that the period of Ethel Venniker’s stay at Kestercham included the first Sunday of the year, the day of the great Sacrament, to which reference has been made in an earlier chapter. Gerald had never attended the Sacrament in Kestercham Church since that first Sunday of the year when he absented himself so tragically. Judge, then, what was Mr. Eversley’s joy, how he lifted his heart in reverent praise to the Almighty, when he saw his son and his future daughter-in-law kneeling side by side, and, without his having said a word to either of them, receiving from his hands the memorials of the Divine Passion. It was almost too much for him; his eyes were filled with tears. The cloud was lifted from his life. Once more, after many days, there was peace--a sacred peace--in Kestercham Vicarage. Once more the relation of father and son was perfected. Once more the old familiar intercourse returned. The two lives became, as it were, one again. Mr. Eversley took out his diary and drew his pen through one ominous entry made there long ago. And she who had done it all, and done it unconsciously, was the beautiful girl who had promised to be Gerald’s bride.