News travels swiftly in a boarding house; and before the lights went out that night it was known to every one of Mr. Brandiston’s boys that Gerald Eversley was not the ‘sneak’ who had revealed the Sunday boxing to Mr. Brandiston.

One or two of the baser spirits, such as Tracy, muttered that his innocence had not been conclusively established, forgetting that the suspicion of his guilt had not been established at all. But for the house generally the acquittal pronounced by the Sixth Form to whom Powis had reported Mr. Brandiston’s words, was sufficient.

As Harry Venniker was undressing that night, he said, ‘Eversley.’

Gerald looked up.

‘I’m awfully glad,’ continued Harry, ‘that you’re cleared. The house was pretty well down upon you, I can tell you, and upon my word it looked bad; but I told them I didn’t believe you would “peach.”’

So ended Gerald’s first trial. Mr. Selby, meeting him soon afterwards in the street, stopped to ask if it was all right, and when he heard that it was, smiled and said only ‘God bless you, Eversley.’

The secret of Mr. Brandiston’s information was never disclosed.

CHAPTER VI
THE HOLIDAYS

It will be believed that Gerald’s return from school to Kestercham for the holidays succeeding his first term was eagerly anticipated by Mr. Eversley. It is no figurative expression to say that he counted the days to it. He would, perhaps, have been ashamed to own that, when Gerald went away to St. Anselm’s, he did what is more commonly done by schoolboys in anticipation of their holidays than by their parents, i.e., he placed upon the desk in his study a calendar showing all the days from the time of his departure to his return, and every night, before he went to bed, carefully drew his pencil through the number of the day that was verging to its close with a feeling of thankfulness in his heart that he was so much nearer to the longed-for reunion. For if Gerald had been lonely in his school life, he had not been so lonely as his father at home. He had exchanged his home for other scenes and interests; he had companions, if not friends, at his side; but his father, left at home, found nobody to fill the place of his son. The second Mrs. Eversley, as her family grew up, became increasingly occupied with domestic affairs; there was even a danger that her ‘good works’ would be neglected; nor had she ever been the centre of his hopes, as Gerald was.

Gerald’s letters, which arrived every Tuesday morning, were a never-ceasing spring of interest to Mr. Eversley. There was no post-office at Kestercham; the letters were brought by a carrier who walked from Wickeston. If he walked briskly, he ought to arrive at the vicarage before breakfast; but he was rather a loquacious person, and, having a large and not very prosperous family, was apt to linger at the cottages and shops of his acquaintances, or at other places, to lament the happiness of one whose domestic quiver was, through no fault of his own, unduly full—a happiness guaranteed (as he was wont to say) by sacred authority, and the more familiarly known to him from the circumstance of his acting on Sundays as parish clerk in Kestercham Church. Instead of ‘speaking with his enemies in the gate,’ Mr. Dawes (for that was the letter-carrier’s name) was not ashamed to be found speaking with his friends in the public-house. This garrulous dilatoriness was a great annoyance to Mr. Eversley, who wanted his letters, and in the early part of Gerald’s school life went near to costing Mr. Dawes his official position in the parish church. On the Tuesday mornings when Mr. Dawes was behind (not his usual, but) his proper time, Mr. Eversley’s impatience would not suffer him to sit down to breakfast before the arrival of the post; but he would walk as far, or nearly as far, as the green gate to meet him and take the letters—or one particular letter—from him; and Mrs. Eversley, as she waited for him—the most exact and punctual of men on other days—would see him walking slowly up the lane, poring eagerly, as if he had no other thought in the world, over the big boyish characters of the letter which he held in his hand, and apparently unconscious of his home or wife or breakfast. On one such occasion she remarked to the parlour-maid, who was putting the poached eggs down to the fire to keep them warm, that ‘she believed her master cared for nothing and nobody but that boy.’ Sometimes Mr. Eversley read the letters or parts of them to his wife; but always he numbered them, as he had numbered the first, on the envelopes and put them away carefully in his desk. The letters themselves were not altogether unworthy of Mr. Eversley’s devoted attention. They were frank natural letters, full of the details which are so wearisome if the heart of the reader is not at one with his who writes, but when they are at one, so delightful. Gerald related whatever interested him, and all that possessed an interest for him interested his father. Perhaps they differed a little from the ordinary letters of schoolboys, and were not the less attractive, by their freshness, as exhibiting the sense of wonderment or surprise which public-school life aroused in the boy who had never known anything like it before. There is always a charm in the narrative of one who observes the phenomena of Nature or Life as if no one had observed them before him. It is the charm of Homer’s similes. Mr. Eversley noticed with the keenest pleasure that the letters showed no sign of alienation from the circumstances of thought and habit at home. Gerald manifested all his old interest in the life of Kestercham. He asked many questions, not only about his family, but about the church and its congregations, about the Harvest Thanksgiving Service which was held at the end of October, about the farmers and their affairs, especially about Mr. Seaford’s horses, and whether the village pond had dried up during the drought, and how many sixpences his father (as his custom was) had paid the school children for the discovery and destruction of wasps’ nests.