The result of all these circumstances--the isolation of life at Kestercham, the lack of domestic sympathy, the limitation of experience--was to throw Gerald more and more into the society of his father. They lived not two lives but one. They had few thoughts apart. The father came more and more to treat his son as his equal in years and worldly knowledge, asking his counsel, or seeming to ask it, upon a hundred little matters of parochial interest which it was impossible for a boy of eleven or twelve years to understand. The son looked upon his father as a friend; he had no secrets from him as so many boys have in early boyhood from their fathers: he talked to him freely, laid his soul bare before him, and invited, nay, entreated him, to scan it. For instance, it was taken as the most natural thing in the world that, if a letter came for Gerald--he was not the recipient of many letters--Mr. Eversley should open and read it. It may be that this perfect intimacy of father and son is hardly attainable except where circumstances create an isolation around them. They knew so much of each other because they knew so little of anyone or anything besides. It is possible at Kestercham, it is not possible in London, but wherever it occurs it is precious and beautiful. Mr. Eversley lived for Gerald, lived in him. Of him, if of any living father, it might be said in the sacred words, ‘His life is bound up in the lad’s life.’ He was a stern man, one of those men who veil intensity of feeling beneath an austere and unemotional exterior; but once when Gerald was lying ill of fever and it was thought that he would die, Mr. Eversley’s passion of grief was terrible. He said nothing, but his face in the morning was like the face of one who had passed the night in weeping, and the servants, who had lain awake in the room above him, said that at every hour they had heard his voice ascending in prayer. Great as had always been the interest which Mr. Eversley displayed in Gerald’s every action and every thought, it was increased as he became aware that his son possessed unusual intellectual powers. He was so little a man of the world that he had never thought of comparing Gerald with other boys, until one day the Rural Dean, whose annual inspection of the church and the church property was a great occasion, having found him reading Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates’ in a corner of his father’s study, and having questioned him upon it, remarked, ‘That’s a very clever boy of yours, Eversley; why don’t you run him for a scholarship somewhere?’