xes 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."

He at all events looke