Beyond a side hall was a long dining-room panelled to the ceiling in oak, and hung on all sides with dead and living Peeles. The carved oaken table was spread with the light unsubstantial feast of the modern time. Adjoining the dining-room were two small reception-rooms looking upon the terrace at the back of the rambling old house. In the middle of this hall, under the carved twisted stair, was a round enclosure whose door opened upon a well, from whence a secret passage led to the river. Mrs. Peele swept across the hall from the dining-room, and raising her lorgnette, considered Patience. “You look very well,” she said, coldly. “Don’t get nervous, please; it is the one thing for which people have no toleration. Where is Beverly?” “He has gone for a drive. You know he does not like entertainments.” Patience’s nerves were muttering, and her mother-in-law’s admonition was not of the nature of balm. Mrs. Peele raised her brows. “It is odd that a bride should have so little influence over her husband,” she remarked; and Patience was now in that equable frame of mind which carries one through the severe ordeals of life. How she did live through that ordeal of introduction to some five hundred people she never knew. Fortunately, all but the neighbours arrived on the special train which had been sent for them, and there was little for her to do but smile and bend her head as Mrs. Peele named her new daughter-in-law to her guests. And whatever might be that exalted dame’s private opinion of her son’s choice, whatever methods she might employ in untrammelled domestic hours to make her disapproval felt, to the world she assumed her habitual air of being supremely content with all that pertained to the house of Peele. Had Patience been the daughter of a belted earl she could not have been presented to New York with a haughtier pride, a calmer assumption that New York must embrace with gratitude and enthusiasm this opportunity to meet the daughter-in-law of the Gardiner Peeles. Her manner gave Patience confidence after a time. Her own pride had already conquered diffidence; and trying as the long ordeal was, she thrilled a little at the sudden realisation of half-formed ambitions. There was no taint of the snob in her; some echo-voice of other generations lifted itself out of the inherited impressions which had moulded her brain cells, and protested against its descendant ranking below the first of the land. Many of the guests were politely indifferent to the honour provided for them; the girls stared at her in a manner calculated to upset any _débutante’s_ equilibrium; but the gracious kindness of others and the languid admiration of the men kept her in poise.