Sylvia had no wrap around her shoulders, and after a while, as she and Lewis watched the fireworks, she felt a shawl gently placed about her. She realised, without turning her head, that the hand was Skelton’s. The rest of the time he stood with them. They were separated from the house by great clumps of crape myrtle, then in its first pink glory. Some invisible bond seemed to unite all three. Skelton felt with the keenest delight the delicious emotions of youth--he was too true a philosopher not to rejoice that he could still feel--and he had always feared and dreaded that chilling of his sensibilities which is the beginning of old age. How bewitching was Sylvia Shapleigh to him then, and if ever they should be married how kind she would be to Lewis! when suddenly came a piercing sense of chagrin and chafing rebellion. He was bound by a chain. All coercion was abnormally hateful to him; and, as Bulstrode had said, the wonder was that he had not gone mad in thinking over how he had been bound by the act of a dead woman. Sylvia felt instinctively a change in him when he spoke. The fireworks were then over, and they went back to the house, where the dancers’ feet still beat monotonously and the music throbbed. They entered through the library windows, and Sylvia admired, as she always did, the noble and imposing array of books. “Let them alone,” said Skelton, with his rare smile that always had something melancholy in it. “See what an old fossil it has made of me!” Sylvia smiled at him archly, and said: “Yes, an old fossil, indeed! But then, when you have written your great book, you will be among the immortals. You will never grow old or die.” The smile died away quickly from Skelton’s face. That book was another bond upon him--that unfulfilled promise to the world to produce something extraordinary. Nobody but Skelton knew the misery that unwritten book had cost him. It had shadowed his whole life. Lewis Pryor had begun to be sleepy by that time, and after supper had been served he slipped back into the library, to which the card players had not yet returned, and curled up on a leather sofa in the embrasure of a window, where he could see the river and listen to the music. He pulled the damask curtains around him, and lay there in a sort of tranquil, happy dream. How far away was the music, and how odd looked the negroes, peering in at the windows, with their great white eyeballs! and before Lewis knew it he was sound asleep, with only a part of his small, glossy-black head showing beyond the curtain.