Old Tom greeted Skelton cordially, and so did Mrs. Shapleigh, who had temporarily buried the hatchet, and who comforted herself by thinking how awfully sorry Skelton would be that he couldn’t marry Sylvia when he saw her and heard her play on the guitar and sing. Mrs. Shapleigh herself was still beautiful; the face that had blinded old Tom thirty years before to the infinite silliness of the woman who owned it had not lost its colour or regularity. But its power to charm faded with its first youth. Stranger than the power of beauty is the narrow limits to which it is restricted. These ideas passed through Skelton’s mind as he saw Mrs. Shapleigh the first time in fifteen years. Sylvia, though, without one half her mother’s beauty, possessed all the charm and grace the older woman lacked. Skelton glanced at her with calm though sincere approval. She was very like the little girl who had swung her white sunbonnet at him, although he knew she must be quite twenty-seven years old; but in her grey eyes was a perpetual girlish innocence she could never lose. Then came the difficult part--speaking to Mr. and Mrs. Blair. Mrs. Blair complicated the situation by blushing suddenly and furiously down to her white throat when Skelton took her hand. Skelton could cheerfully have wrung her neck in rage for her blushing at that moment. She was changed, of course, from seventeen, but Skelton thought her rather improved; she had gained colour and flesh without losing her slenderness. Jack Blair had got very middle-aged looking, to Skelton’s eyes, and his youthful trimness and slimness were quite gone; but nobody had found it out except Skelton. Then there was the long, thin parson with the troubled eyes. Bulstrode was as awkward as a walrus in company, and glanced sympathetically at James, black and miserable, whose feelings he quite divined. Sylvia in the course of long years had been forced to acquire quite an extraordinary amount of tact, in order to cover the performances of Mrs. Shapleigh, and she found she had use for all of it. Mrs. Shapleigh, however, was completely awed by the deadly civility with which Skelton received all of her _non sequiturs_, and soon relapsed into a blessed silence. This gave Sylvia a chance to take Skelton off very dexterously in a corner. “I am so glad to see Deerchase inhabited again,” she said in her pretty way. “It is pleasant to see the smoke coming out of the chimneys once more.” “It is very pleasant to be there once more,” answered Skelton. “After all, one longs for one’s own roof. I did not think, the afternoon you paid me that interesting visit, that fifteen years would pass before I should see the old place again.” “Ah, that visit!” cried Sylvia, blushing--blushing for something of which Skelton never dreamed. “I daresay you were glad enough to get rid of me. What inconceivable impertinence I had!” “Is the crab’s bite well yet?” “Quite well, thank you. And have you remembered that all these years?”