Being such as she was, and having been so for a greater number of years than she would perhaps have been willing to confess, it was not to be expected that she would draw Mr. Eversley out of his solitary, meditative mode of life. Apart from other reasons, there is in women, especially in such women as are married late in life, a specious selfishness which takes the form of keeping their husbands perpetually at their sides; but this selfishness appears to them so true a virtue that I have known a woman (who in the phraseology of religious society would have been called ‘a good woman’) take a positive pride in maiming and crippling the active beneficence of her husband’s life. If Mrs. Eversley had been asked why she kept her husband more and more within the confines of his own parish, she would have said that it was not for those who had been ‘converted’ to take a pleasure in the ‘beggarly elements’ of the world. But if anyone else had been asked, he would have said that the reason was--not perhaps wholly, but principally--that she liked to monopolise his society. Certain it is, however, that Mr. Eversley, after his second marriage, was not less assiduous--he was, if possible, even more devoted than before--in the discharge of his regular parochial duties. Day succeeded day with easy welcome monotony. The morning, after prayers and breakfast, he would devote to reading and writing, or, as the years went on, to teaching Gerald, or sometimes to conversing with his parishioners upon subjects of general or local interest which to them were all-important; in the afternoon, wet or fine, he would visit his people, striding along the road with Gerald at his side; the evening was again a time of study, except on Sundays when Mr. Eversley read aloud a Sunday book or expounded a passage of the Bible. The people of Kestercham felt an affection not unmingled with awe for his tall figure, associated as it was, or would be, with the solemn incidents of their history--baptism, public worship, marriage, sickness, death; one old lady seeing him set out on a snowy evening wrapped in his long Inverness cape remarked that he ‘looked like a warrior.’ But there was not a case of distress or suffering that he did not seek to relieve, nor was he ever weary in his efforts to reclaim and reform those who in the dark theology of his household were known as ‘vessels of wrath.’ It might be thought that his treatment of spiritual and moral evils erred a little in the way of uniformity; he dealt with them all alike, believing, as he used himself to say, that there was ‘one Gospel for all, rich and poor, bond and free,’ and one sole remedy provided by that Gospel for all the varied ills of sorrow-stricken humanity. But it had been well for the Church of England if all her ministers had been as devoted as Mr. Eversley. He won from church-people and dissenters alike the respect which is due to a consistent and God-fearing character.