It was about nine o’clock when she heard a shout some distance down the river, and a boat pulled up, through the ghostly light, towards Deerchase. Sylvia started in feverish haste towards the bridge. She ran in her eagerness. As she reached the farther end, just at the Deerchase lawn, she met Conyers coming towards her. [Illustration: “IT IS LEWIS--LEWIS IS ALIVE!” HE SAID. “HE IS EXHAUSTED, BUT WILL RECOVER.”--_Page 322_] “It is Lewis--Lewis is alive!” he said. “He tied the tiller rope around him--that was what saved him. He is exhausted, but he will recover. The boat was found drifting about just below Lone Point.” Sylvia tried to ask, “Has anything been heard of Mr. Skelton?” but she could not. Conyers understood the dumb question in her eyes, and shook his head. Poor, poor Sylvia! Sylvia, scarcely knowing what she did, walked by Conyers’s side across the Deerchase lawn. They met a crowd--Blair carrying Lewis in his arms, and Bulstrode trudging along weeping, and the negroes following. Lewis’s face was purplish, and he seemed scarcely to breathe; but when Bob Skinny came running out of the house with a bottle of brandy, and they poured some down his throat, he opened his eyes and managed to gasp, “Where is Mr. Skelton?” Nobody answered him. Lewis gulped down more brandy, and cried out in a weak, distressed voice: “I saw Mr. Skelton put off in the boat for me, and I was so afraid for him--” His head fell over; he could not finish what he was saying. Blair and Bulstrode took the boy in the house and put him to bed and worked with him; but Sylvia could not leave the shore, and Conyers stayed with her and Bob Skinny, down whose ashy face a constant stream of tears poured. Conyers tried to encourage Sylvia--the search was still going on, up and down the river--but she looked at him with calm, despairing eyes. An hour before midnight a boat was seen coming up the river from Lone Point. Almost immediately the distant cries, the commotion along the shore ceased. It was the first boat that had returned, except the one that brought Lewis. The negroes all gathered in crowds at the Deerchase landing. Sylvia and Conyers stood on the little pier. The moon was at the full by that time, and although the water was still dark and troubled, the silver disc shone with pale serenity, and the stars glittered in the midnight sky. Conyers, although used to sights of human suffering, turned his face away from Sylvia’s pallid anguish. When the boat struck the steps that led down from the wharf, the negroes suddenly uttered their weird shrieks of lamentation. Skelton’s body was being lifted out.