Mrs. Shapleigh had heard that Skelton dined late, so she named six o’clock for the dinner--a perfectly preposterous hour at that period of the nineteenth century. She also managed to have three men to wait at dinner by pressing into the service James, the coachman and gardener. James was an inky-black object, who, with a pair of large white cotton gloves on, was as helpless as a turtle on his back. However, Mrs. Shapleigh was a first-class housekeeper, and the dinner was sure to be a good one--so Sylvia comforted herself. Skelton quite truthfully said it was the best dinner he had seen since he left Virginia--turtle soup, oysters in half a dozen ways, a royal display of fish, a saddle of venison, wild ducks and woodcock and partridges, a ham cured with hickory ashes and boiled in two quart bottles of old Tom Shapleigh’s best champagne. There were, besides, a great many and-so-forths, but Skelton did not say that he enjoyed the dinner particularly, and so saved his reputation for truth. As a matter of fact, he regarded it as something worse than a bore. He shrewdly suspected that Elizabeth Blair would be there, and it would be his first meeting with her after that awkward little _contretemps_ of so many years ago--for he had managed to avoid her during that solitary year he spent at Deerchase. In fact, everybody invited to the dinner was in more or less trepidation. Skelton arrived punctually at six o’clock, and Bulstrode was with him. Everybody else, though, had taken six o’clock to mean half-past five, and were promptly on hand. It was not quite dusk, and the purple twilight was visible through the open windows, but the wax candles were lighted and glowed softly in the mellow half-light.