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.�
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: