Page:The Berkeleys and their neighbors.djvu/27

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so well. I must, however, leave you now, as I am one of the managers, and must look after the weighing."

"Now you are going away because I have been disagreeable," remarked Madame Koller reproachfully. "And poor Ahlberg—"

"Must take care of you, and do his best to amuse you," answered Pembroke with a laugh and a look that classed Ahlberg with Madame's poodle or her parrot. "Good-bye," and in a minute he was gone. Madame Koller looked sulky. Mr. Ahlberg's good humor and composure were perfectly unruffled.

Hardly any one noticed Pembroke's little expedition except Mrs. Peyton and Olivia Berkeley. Mrs. Peyton mounted a pair of large gold spectacles, and then remarked to Olivia:

"My dear, there's French Pembroke talking to my niece, Eliza Peyton—" Mrs. Peyton was a Peyton before she married one—"Madame Elise Koller she now calls herself."

"Yes, I see."

"I suppose you saw a good deal of her in Paris, and my sister-in-law, Sarah Scaife that was—now Madame Schmidt. She showed me the dear departed's picture the other day—a horrid little wretch he looked, while my brother, Edmund Peyton, was the handsomest young man in the county."

"We saw Madame Koller quite often," said Olivia. Mrs. Peyton was amazingly clever as a mind reader, and saw in a moment there was no