There was no gainsaying this reasoning, nor would Mr. and Mrs. Barlow have asked Brenda to change her plans. What remonstrances there were came from some of the relatives, and from many of Brenda's young friends not invited to the house, who felt that in some way they were to lose something worth seeing. As Brenda had decreed that it should be a house wedding, they were not even to have the privileges of lookers-on, as might have been the case at a church wedding. But was ever any family perfectly satisfied with the plans made for the wedding of one of its members? Was there ever a wedding in preparing for which various persons did not think themselves more or less slighted? How, then, could Brenda expect to please all in her large connection? Now, in spite of her impulsiveness, Brenda had been considered rather conventional, and on this account many felt aggrieved that she had insisted on having the affair small and informal. Yet after all it wasn't a very small wedding, and the drawing-rooms at Rockley were well filled, though with a far less fashionable assemblage than that which had surrounded and greeted Agnes and Ralph Weston six years before. There were naturally a certain number of relatives present, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Blair, Dr. and Mrs. Gostar, and a few other old friends of both Brenda's and Arthur's families. Besides the "Four," and Julia and Amy and Ruth, there were Frances Pounder and two or three of Brenda's former schoolmates. Miss Crawdon, too, had been invited, and one or two teachers from her school. Frances Pounder, as her friends still called her, was now Mrs. Egbert Romeyn, and her husband was to perform the marriage ceremony. Mr. Romeyn's church was in a mission centre on the outskirts of the city, and Frances gladly shared his parish labors. To the great surprise of all who knew her, she had really buried the pride and haughty spirit of her school days. Anstiss and Miss South and the rest of the staff of the Mansion were present; and besides Philip Blair, and Will Hardon and Nora's brothers, and Fritz Tomkins and Ben Creighton, there were several other young men, Arthur's special friends chiefly, with a few of those who had known Brenda from childhood. Then in addition to these were a number of "unnecessary people," as Belle called them in a stage whisper to Nora,--all the girls from the Mansion, for example, every one of whom had accepted the invitation, and the whole Rosa family, from Mrs. Rosa to the youngest child. Since the defeat of the Spanish, and especially since the destruction of Cervera's fleet, Angelina had had little to say about her Spanish blood. Indeed, she had been overheard giving an elaborate explanation to one of the Mansion girls of the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, with the advantage on the side of the Portuguese, from whom, she said, she was proud to be descended, "although," she had added, "I was born in the United States, and so I shall always be an American citizen."