The people of Kestercham had no idea of admitting casual or occasional worshippers to their church; they expected a person to worship there regularly or never. The unhappy visitor found himself the object of a hundred inquisitive and indignant eyes. He became conscious that he was an alien, a heretic, a Gentile, who had no right to set foot within the sanctuary. Not being a parishioner of Kestercham, he possessed no title to enjoy the spiritual privileges of that favoured locality. There might be vacant seats in half the pews, but nobody invited him to occupy one of them. It happened not seldom that Mr. Eversley himself, after making futile signs to the churchwarden who was staring at the interloper over his spectacles, would leave his reading-desk and escort the stranger to a seat in the vicarage pew, running the gauntlet, as he did so, of all the farmers who looked daggers at him for being so foolish or immoral as to encourage the presumption of trespassers upon the spiritual preserves of Kestercham parish. It would be easy to multiply instances of the eccentricity or exclusiveness that prevailed in Kestercham during Gerald Eversley’s early days. But this chapter is long enough; it may fitly conclude with an extract taken from one of his own letters. ‘The place I loved best in Kestercham,’ he wrote once, ‘was the churchyard. The solemn stillness entranced me. I spent many hours there. I knew by heart most of the inscriptions on the gravestones, and I sometimes wondered, though I never dared to ask my father how it was, that the world, or the parish of Kestercham at least, had grown so much worse in the last few years; for the people buried in the churchyard seemed nearly all to have been virtuous and godly, and yet I often heard my father say in church that the people whom he knew and saw every day and got on with very well, were “miserable sinners,” and their hearts “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” But to me Kestercham churchyard was holy ground. My mother’s grave was there, under the yew tree by the chancel of the church. It was there that she had wished to be buried; the spot was so peaceful (she said) and the trees shaded it so beautifully except on the east side, where the morning rays fell upon it, and she would lie in the midst of her own people. Next to her grave is a space reserved for my father when he dies. Sometimes, when the grass was green above the dead, I would take a book and lie all the summer’s afternoon by the graveside, looking up to the blue heaven. I used to think I should be laid to rest there too. I cannot remember my mother; she died when I was born. All that I can think of her is fancy, imagination. It may be false, but I love the thought that it is true. For now and then, in the early morning, in the golden time between sleeping and waking, a vision comes to me of a sweet calm face, with wistful eyes looking far into the future. It is a