He opened a door close by, and they entered a little sitting room, very simple and old-fashioned, and in no way corresponding to the rest of the house. It had whitewashed walls above the wainscoting, and the furniture was in faded yellow damask. “I intend to let this room remain as it is, to remind me that I was once a boy, for this is the first room I remember in the Deerchase house.” Sylvia looked around with calmly contemptuous eyes. “When I come to Deerchase to live I shall make this room as fine as the rest. But I must go home now. I can get my shoe on, and perhaps mamma won’t notice that I limp a little. You’d better take me in the boat, so I can get back to the house from the river shore.” Skelton, who thought it high time she was returning, at once agreed. As he lifted her out of the boat on the Belfield shore a sudden impulse made him say: “Sylvia, can you keep a secret?” “Of course I can,” answered Sylvia promptly. “Then--I am going away to-morrow morning, to be gone a year, perhaps longer. This is the last sail I shall take upon the river for a long, long time.” Sylvia’s eyes were full of regret. Although she had seen Skelton at a distance nearly every day of her life when he was at Deerchase, and had also seen him upon the rare occasions that visits were exchanged between the two places, yet he had all the charm of a new and dazzling acquaintance to her. She never remembered speaking a word with him before, but there was a delightful intimacy between them now, she thought. She expressed her regret at his going so volubly that Skelton was forced to laugh; and she wound up by flinging her arms around his neck and kissing him violently. At this Skelton thought it time to leave. His last glimpse of Sylvia was as she stood swinging her wet, white sunbonnet dolefully on the sandy shore. That night a terrible storm came up. It flooded all the low-lying fields, swept over the prim gardens at Deerchase, and washed away a part of the bridge between Deerchase and Belfield. When, at daylight in the morning, Skelton, with Bob Skinny, left Deerchase, everything was under water, and trees and shrubs and fences and hedges bore witness of the fury of the wind and the rain. Skelton’s last view of Deerchase was a gloomy one. He meant then to be gone a year; he remained away fifteen years. CHAPTER IV. Meanwhile things went on placidly enough around the silent and uninhabited Deerchase. The negroes worked the plantation under the overseer’s management, and the house was well cared for, as well as the grounds. Every year there was an alarm that Skelton was coming home, but he never came. At last, like a thunderclap, came the news that he was married to an English woman of rank and wealth.