Scarcely had the carriage turned into the lane, when Mr. Cole burst forth:
“Miss Olivia, did you ever meet a more godless person in your life than Mr. Ahlberg?”
“I don’t think I ever did,” answered Olivia, with much sincerity.
“But the widow—Eliza Peyton—eh, Cole? I think you have made some headway there,” cried the Colonel, wagging his head at the little clergyman. Mr. Cole’s heart began to thump. Strange it was that although he ought, as a Christian and a clergyman, to disapprove of Madame Koller with her beautiful blonde hair, he could not find it in his heart to feel it. Nevertheless he could say it easily enough.
“I very much doubt, sir, the propriety of my visiting at The Beeches.”
“Pooh, pooh. You’ll get over it,” chuckled Colonel Berkeley.
Ah, John Chrysostom! Has it never been known that the outward man denounced what the inward man yearned and hankered after? At this very moment do you not remember the turn of Madame Koller’s handsome head, and the faint perfume that exhaled from her trailing gown?
“We must invite them to dinner,” said the Colonel, decidedly. “Cole, you must come, too. That poor devil, Ahlberg, is almost starved at the tavern on fried chicken three times a day, and claret from the tavern bar.”
CHAPTER III.
A round of solemn afternoon dinings followed the return of the Berkeleys to Isleham, and were scrupulously returned. But both the Colonel and Olivia felt that it would not be well to include any of the county gentry the day Madame Koller and Mr. Ahlberg were to dine with them. Mr. Cole had already been invited—and Colonel Berkeley of his own free will, without saying a word to Olivia, asked the two Pembrokes. Olivia, when she heard of this, was intensely vexed. She had used both sarcasm and persuasion on Pembroke in Paris to get him home, and he had laughed at her. Yet she was firmly convinced, as soon as Madame Koller expressed a determination to come, either Pembroke had agreed, or else Madame Koller had followed him—in either case Olivia was not pleased, and received the Colonel’s information that the Pembrokes would be there sure in ominous silence. Nothing remained but for her to show what a remarkably good dinner she could give—and this she felt was clearly within her power. She was naturally a clever housekeeper, and as the case often was in those days, the freedom of the negroes had made but little difference in the ménage at Isleham. Most of the house servants had turned squatters on the plantation. Petrarch, unpopular among his confrères because of his superior advantages and accomplishments as well as his assumption of righteousness, was the major-domo—and then there was Ike, a gingerbread colored Chesterfield, as dining-room servant.