“My daughter will stay here,” he said, to the servant’s astonishment.  “Get the spare room ready at once.  You will be hostess to-night, Sylvia, and sit at the head of the table.  I become a family man.  Well, well!”

He took Sylvia up-stairs and showed her a little bright room with a big window which looked out across the garden.  He carried her boxes up himself.  “We don’t run to a butler,” he said.  “Got everything you want?  Ring if you haven’t.  We have supper at eight and we shan’t dress.  Only—­well, you couldn’t look dowdy if you tried.”

Sylvia had not the slightest intention to try.  She put on a little frock of white lace, high at the throat, dressed her hair, and then having a little time to spare she hurriedly wrote a letter.  This letter she gave to the servant and she ran down-stairs.

“You will be careful to have it posted, please!” she said, and at that moment her father came out into the passage, so quickly that he might have been listening for her approach.

She stopped upon the staircase, a few steps above him.  The evening was still bright, and the daylight fell upon her from a window above the hall door.

“Shall I do?” she asked, with a smile.

The staircase was paneled with a dark polished wood, and she stood out from that somber background, a white figure, delicate and dainty and wholesome, from the silver buckle on her satin slipper to the white flower she had placed in her hair.  Her face, with its remarkable gentleness, its suggestion of purity as of one unspotted by the world, was turned to him with a confident appeal.  Her clear gray eyes rested quietly on his.  Yet she saw his face change.  It seemed that a spasm of pain or revolt shook him.  Upon her face there came a blank look.  Why was he displeased?  But the spasm passed.  He shrugged his shoulders and threw off his doubt.

“You are very pretty,” he said.

Sylvia’s smile just showed about the corners of her lips and her face cleared.

“Yes,” she said, with satisfaction.

Garratt Skinner laughed.

“Oh, you know that?”

“Yes,” she replied, nodding her head at him.

He led the way down the passage toward the back of the house, and throwing open a door introduced her to his friends.

“Captain Barstow,” he said, and Sylvia found herself shaking hands with a little middle-aged man with a shiny bald head and a black square beard.  He had an eye-glass screwed into his right eye, and that whole side of his face was distorted by the contraction of the muscles and drawn upward toward the eye.  He did not look at her directly, but with an oblique and furtive glance he expressed his sense of the honor which the introduction conferred on him.  However, Sylvia was determined not to be disappointed.  She turned to the next of her father’s guests.

“Mr. Archie Parminter.”