Lady Venniker being left at Helmsbury, where her daughter remained as her companion, was wholly dependent upon the information sent to her from St. Anselm’s. Her husband wrote to her often. Mr. Brandiston wrote several times, though rather formally. But her most frequent correspondent in that anxious, torturing time was Gerald Eversley. In his own heartrending anxiety, quickening, as it did, his sympathetic intuitions, it occurred to him to seek the consolation of his sorrow in trying to console one yet more sorrowful than himself. He felt so much for Lady Venniker, especially as she was prevented from coming to St. Anselm’s, that he could not help informing her of his feeling. He wrote to her timidly and half-apologetically at first; but afterwards, as he found she welcomed his letters, with a larger freedom, telling her of the medical reports (though these she knew from others), of the hopes and fears of the school, of the boys’ sayings, of Harry’s popularity, of his own great love for him, what Mr. Brandiston had said, how Dr. Pearson had asked the prayers of the whole school in chapel, and had spoken in his sermon of the cloud which hung over it, and what a stillness of awe prevailed all over the house. The unconscious pathos of the letters was a truer comfort to Lady Venniker than any assurance conveyed in them. Her daughter generally replied in her name, giving him her mother’s heartfelt thanks, and her own, for his thoughtfulness. Every day, morning and evening, the letters were sent. They were the simple natural outpourings of a sorrowing soul. But they created a sympathy--a sympathy that was destined to be of enduring value--between Lady Venniker and her son’s friend. She ceased to call him ‘Mr. Eversley;’ she called him ‘Gerald.’ ‘We feel,’ wrote Miss Venniker, ‘that you are indeed one of ourselves, from your love of our dear Harry, and we can never think of you as a stranger any more.’ The critical time--the time of intense anxiety--lasted eight days. In the course of them Gerald wrote once to his father, describing the ebb and flow of anxiety in the school--he would have written oftener but for his correspondence with Lady Venniker--and Mr. Eversley replied most tenderly, assuring him that he was daily ‘wrestling with the Lord in prayer’ for his friend’s recovery.