Skelton had all along spoken in a quiet, conventional tone, but at this he uttered a slight exclamation, and ground his teeth with silent fury. The boy’s obstinacy was intolerable to a man accustomed to make his will the law. Of course, he could do as he pleased about it; he could prove the whole thing to-morrow morning, if he liked, but he did not want to be opposed by the person he wished to benefit; and besides, he loved the boy well, and contradiction from him was therefore doubly hard. Lewis got up to go out. As he passed, rather a grim smile came into Skelton’s face. He saw his own look of firm determination upon the boy’s thin-lipped, eloquent mouth, and in his dark eyes. Lewis was growing more like him every day. Poor little fool! Talk about proving himself to be the son of that lanky, loose-jointed Thomas Pryor! It was ridiculous. CHAPTER XIX. Skelton had cold fits and hot fits as regarded Sylvia. At first he considered his cold fit as his abnormal condition, and the hot fit as an agreeable form of insanity. But he soon changed his opinion. He was beginning, late in life, to live through what other men are generally done with by that time. In Sylvia’s society he felt always an exquisite sense of well-being that he could not remember ever to have felt before with any human being except in a certain way with Lewis. When the boy had been younger Skelton recalled, that to watch him at play, or at his work, had always given him strange delight--a delight unique of its kind, and more nearly resembling happiness than anything he had ever known. But looking back calmly upon his life, he could not remember that he had ever known apart from Sylvia and Lewis that joyous sense of existence which is happiness. He remembered that in his early days he had felt a sense of triumph when the public--his public--caught at the idea of his future greatness. He knew well enough a certain refined and elevated pleasure in purely intellectual pursuits. But happiness is the child of the affections, and Skelton’s affections had fared rather badly. He recollected his early passion for Elizabeth Armistead with hatred. She had given him fierce joys and sharp pain, but that was far removed from happiness. His marriage had been from a curious mixture of motives, and he dared not admit to himself how little love had had to do with it; he had felt tenderness and extreme gratitude to his wife, but happiness had still eluded him. Now, however, he realised with keen pleasure that, after all, he was not done with life and youth--he had not yet come down to the dregs and heel taps of existence. He had sounded all the depths and shoals of a life of pleasure and of a life of intellect, and he was tired of both. True it was, that books still had a fatal fascination for him; that passion for reading and for making his mind drunk at the fountain of other men’s knowledge was ineradicable. But he had at last come to crave something else. Like all