foibles of his fellow creatures. It was very innocent, very feminine, and very exasperating.
Nevertheless, within a week the big landau was drawn up, and Colonel Berkeley and his daughter set forth, en grand tenue, with Petrarch on the box, to call on Madame Koller. The Colonel had never ceased teasing his daughter to go. Time hung heavy on his hands, and although he had not found Madame Koller particularly captivating elsewhere, and Madame Schmidt bored him to death upon the few occasions when she appeared, yet, when he was at Isleham, the ladies at The Beeches assumed quite a fascinating aspect to his imagination. The Colonel had a private notion of his own that Madame Koller had been a little too free with her income, and that a year's retirement would contribute to the health of her finances. Olivia, however, believed that Madame Koller had but one object in returning to America, and that was because Pembroke had come. She remembered one evening in Paris, Pembroke had "dropped in," American fashion. The doctors had then said that nothing could be done to restore poor Miles to comeliness—and meanwhile, another blow had fallen upon the two brothers. Their only sister, Elizabeth, a handsome, high spirited girl, older than they, had died—and there had been a violent breach between her and their father to which death alone put a truce. When the country was overrun with troops, a Federal officer had protected the plantation as far as he could, had saved the old father
