Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would be there at eight. During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant, brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful parent. She looked at herself in the glass. “My son’s wife,” was the phrase in her mind. On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her anxieties to her mother. “Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl he wanted to marry?” “Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him think so, too.” Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete’s mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby. Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it, Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn’t told her about it. And the reason he hadn’t told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand. He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too late to endanger the dinner. No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault of allowing her guests to wait for her.