Sylvia advanced a step, and the bearers laid their burden down before her. One side of his face was much discoloured, and one arm hung down, where it had been wrenched out of its socket. Conyers tore open the coat and placed his hand upon Skelton’s heart. There was not the slightest flutter. The discoloured face was set--he had been dead some little time. Sylvia neither wept nor lamented. Her terrible calmness made Conyers’s blood run chill. “Carry him to the house,” she said, after a moment, in which she had leaned down and touched his cold forehead. “He is quite dead. It is not worth while to send for a doctor. See, this terrible blow upon the head stunned him--perhaps killed him. I never saw a dead person before, but I tell you there is nothing to be done for him.” The negroes took him up and carried him tenderly, Bob Skinny holding the poor dislocated arm in place, and everybody wept except Sylvia. Skelton had been a good master, and the horror of his death worked upon the quick sympathies of the negroes. Sylvia walked blindly after them, not knowing where she was going, and not caring. The house was lighted up, as the house servants had been alarmed in the beginning of the storm. The body was carried in the house and laid down in the hall; and Bulstrode, coming down the broad stairs and looking at what once was Richard Skelton, turned pale and almost fainted. Then there was an awful moment of uncertainty. What was to be done? Bulstrode was clearly unable to give directions or to do anything. Blair was working with Lewis upstairs, and, besides, there was something too frightfully incongruous in applying to him. Conyers, his heart breaking for Sylvia, dared not leave her, and there was nobody to do for the master of the house. Then Bob Skinny, the most useless, the vainest, the least dependable of creatures, suddenly came to the fore. He had loved Skelton with blind devotion, and he had been the person who was with Skelton the most of any one in the world. “I kin see ’bout Mr. Skelton,” he said, trembling. “Me and Sam Trotter, an’ dese here house niggers kin do fer him.”