One strange feature of Mr. Eversley’s parochial visitation Gerald seems to have remembered with interest; for I find it recorded long afterwards in one of his letters. ‘It was characteristic,’ he says, ‘of my father, who was a man of very few words, that the observations which he addressed to a sick person were often punctuated by long pauses. I have known him sit for as long a time as five minutes in a sick-room, saying nothing, and without a word being said by anybody. Such silence would seem intolerable. But as between him and his parishioners it did not excite any feeling of constraint. I have sometimes wondered in later days how they could endure it. It appeared that they liked it. There was a subtle sense of sympathy between him and them; he felt for them, and they realised that he felt for them; there was no need to put the feeling into words. I have noticed that lovers in the country will walk for a long time on a summer’s afternoon, hand in hand, but not speaking a word, only conscious of each other’s affection, and delighting in it; that is what was called “keeping company” at Kestercham. Consecutive speech, which is so easy to the cultivated, is to the ignorant an effort or a pain. My father’s parishioners did not always take in the meaning of such words as he used in speaking or reading to them; one old labourer, to whom he had read the fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, I have heard repeating over and over the words, “Arise, let us go hence,” as if they were full of comfort to his soul. The parishioners did not need that my father should sustain a conversation with them, it was enough that he was at their side in the dark hours; they were sure of his sympathy, and content with it.’