Determination was expressed in every line of Sylvia’s tearful, pretty face. Skelton silently went back to the shore, got her shoes and stockings, went to his boat and brought it up, Sylvia meanwhile keeping up a furious beating of the water with her forked stick to frighten the crabs off. Skelton lifted her in the boat, and they sailed along to the Deerchase landing. Sylvia wiped her feet on the curtain of her sunbonnet, put on her stockings and one shoe, and nursed the injured foot tenderly. Skelton lifted her out on the little stone pier he had had built, and then proceeded to take down the sail and tie the boat. “I think,” said Sylvia calmly, “you’ll have to carry me to the house.” “Hadn’t you better let me send for my _calèche_ and pair for you?” gravely asked Skelton. “Oh, no,” cried Sylvia briskly, and Skelton without a word picked her up and walked across the grassy lawn to the house. She was very light, and, except for flapping her wet sunbonnet in his face, he had no objection whatever to her. He carried her up the steps into the hall, and then turned her over to Mammy Kitty, who wrapped her foot in wet cabbage-leaves. Skelton went to the library. Presently, Bob Skinny’s woolly head was thrust in the door. “Please, sah, Mr. Skelton, de young lady say will you please to come d’yar?” Skelton, smiling at himself, rose and went back to the hall. Sylvia was perched on one foot, like a stork. “I think,” she said, “if you’ll give me your arm I can walk around and look at the pretty things. Whenever I’ve been here with mamma she has always asked so many questions that I didn’t like to ask any myself.” “You may ask any questions you like,” replied Skelton, still smiling. He never remembered exchanging a word with the child before. He had taken for granted that she was her mother’s own daughter, and as such he had no wish to cultivate her. But Sylvia was not at all like her mother. She limped around the hall, looking gravely at the portraits. The Skeltons were a handsome family, if the portraits could be believed. They were all dark, with clear-cut faces and high aquiline noses like Skelton’s, and they were all young. “_We_ have some portraits, you know,” remarked Sylvia, “but they are all old and ugly. Now, all of these are of pretty little girls and boys or handsome young ladies.” “The Skeltons are not a long-lived family,” said Skelton. “They generally die before forty. Here is one--Janet Skelton--a little girl like you. She died at eighteen.” Sylvia turned her grey eyes full of a limpid green light towards him pityingly. “Aren’t you going to live long?” “Perhaps,” replied Skelton, smiling. “I think,” said Sylvia calmly, after a while, “if I were grown up I should like to live here.” “Very well,” answered Skelton, who at twenty-two thought the twelve-year-old Sylvia a toddling infant; “as I intend to be an old bachelor, you may come and be my little sister. You may have my mother’s room--here it is.”