CHAPTER II.
SYLVIA GOES VISITING "How old did you say you were, Sylvia ?" "I'm sixteen in October, grandpa," answered Sylvia.
"Is it possible!" murmured the professor.

"And to think that you've never been to school." "Why, I've been going to school every day, almost, ever since I can remember.

And haven't I had the finest teacher in the world, all to myself ?" His face brightened responsive to her laugh.
This was at the tea-table--for the Keltons dined at noon in conformity with local custom--nearly a week after the unsigned letter had been delivered to Andrew Kelton by the unknown messenger.

Sylvia and her grandfather had just returned from a walk, prolonged into the cool dusk.
They sat at the square walnut table, where they had so long faced each other three times a day.

Sylvia had never doubted that their lives would go on forever in just this way,--that they would always be, as her grandfather liked to put it, "shipmates," walking together, studying together, sitting as they sat now, at their simple meals, with just the same quaintly flowered dishes, the same oddly turned teapot, with its attendant cream pitcher (slightly cracked as to lip) and the sugar-bowl, with a laboring ship depicted in blue on its curved side, which was not related, even by the most remote cousinship, to anything else in the pantry.
Professor Kelton was unwontedly preoccupied to-night.