vision only; it endures but a little while; then it vanishes, and I see it no more. But I awake, and it is as if I had beheld the face of my mother.’ CHAPTER III FATHER AND SON Mr. Eversley did not long remain a widower. He was, it may be supposed, one of those persons of warm hearts and transient affections who imagine that the sincerest compliment which can be paid to a wife who is dead is to marry another wife as soon as possible. He announced his approaching happiness to such of his people as he chanced to meet in his parochial visitations, by saying that he was going to ‘give his little boy another mother,’ Another mother! The words fell painfully upon Gerald’s ears at a later time when he had begun to make an idol of his own mother. Lying by her grave and gazing upwards to the heaven of heavens, he had dreamed of meeting her again. It had not occurred to him that she could be replaced. Mr. Eversley’s habits were not much changed by his second marriage. He had never cared for society, but had lived much to himself. Visiting is always a serious matter in the country; it cannot be undertaken without a good deal of thought and trouble; it involves a long drive, and that is often difficult (as the readers of Miss Austen’s novels will remember) unless there is a moon, and even so the moon is not to be depended on. But Mr. Eversley at the time of his bereavement got out of the way of associating even with the neighbouring clergy. He seldom received a visit, seldom paid one. He devoted himself to his parish and to his son. They were his world--the only world that he thought of or cared about. For them he felt himself responsible to God; for all beyond the responsibility rested with others. Except when he helped the clergyman of an adjoining parish during illness or absence by taking an evening service after his own regular services at Kestercham, or attended (occasionally, but with decreasing regularity) the annual missionary meeting at X----, he hardly ever left his home. Once after an attack of bronchitis he was persuaded by medical advice to go to the seaside for a month in the hope of recruiting his health, but that was his one holiday between the death of his first wife and the beginning of Gerald’s schooldays at St. Anselm’s, and he was heartily glad when it was over. He was fond of describing himself as a ‘home bird.’ He disbelieved in the migratory tendencies of the age. That a rolling stone would gather no moss was one of his favourite proverbs. It did not, I think, occur to him that if the stone never moved at all, the crust of superincumbent moss might possibly in the lapse of years become excessive.