The boy’s unhappy face, though, haunted him. Skelton had not once seen him smile since that night of the ball. He went about solemnly, his black eyes, that were usually full of light, sombre and distressed, and Service was never allowed out of his sight. He kept closely to Deerchase, and did not even go to Belfield until Sylvia wrote him a note gently chiding him. As for Sylvia, whatever she felt for Skelton, she had adopted the general belief that he would never marry at all. She felt a kind of resentment towards him, for, after comparing him with the other men she knew, she acknowledged promptly to herself that she could never marry any of those other men. Skelton had done her that ill turn; he had shown her so conclusively the charm of a man with every advantage of birth, breeding, intellect, knowledge of the world, and, above all, his subtile personal charm, that other men wearied her. Even Blair, who found women usually responsive to him, discovered that Sylvia was rather bored with him. She had tasted of the tree of knowledge, and was neither better nor happier for it. She was acute enough to see that her society gave Skelton more pleasure than any other woman’s, but then that was easily understood. Provincials are generally uninterestingly alike. Sylvia Shapleigh happened to be a little different from the rest. In her own family she was singularly lonely. Her father was the conventional good father, and both of her parents were proud of her. But she was a being different from any in their experience. Old Tom Shapleigh boasted of her spirit, and said he believed Sylvia was waiting to marry the President of the United States; but he was vexed that she was getting out of her twenties so fast without making a good match, and every offer she had always provoked a quarrel between father and daughter. Mrs. Shapleigh considered that Sylvia’s obstinacy in that respect was expressly meant as a defiance of maternal authority, and continually reproached her that she would yet bring her mother’s grey hairs with sorrow to the grave because she wouldn’t accept any offer made to her. Lewis Pryor was not more lonely than Sylvia Shapleigh, although, womanlike, she showed more fortitude and was more uncomplaining about it. But on account of that solitariness common to both of them, the imaginative woman and the half-developed boy had a sympathy for each other--an odd, sweet community of thought. Sylvia had heard all the talk floating about the county regarding Lewis Pryor, and had observed the coldness with which the world, which smiled so benignly on Skelton, frowned on the innocent boy; but, more just as well as more generous than the sodden world, his misfortune was only another reason why she should be kind to him.