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It takes a long time for a country neighborhood to recover from a sensation. Three or four years after Madame Koller, or Eliza Peyton had disappeared along with her mother and Ahlberg, people were still discussing her wonderful ways. Mr. Cole was paying his court mildly to Olivia Berkeley, but in his heart of hearts he had not forgotten his blonde enslaver. The Colonel was the same Colonel—his shirt-ruffle rushed out of his bosom as impetuously as of old. He continued to hate the Hibbses. Dashaway had been turned out to grass, but another screw continued to carry the Colonel's colors to defeat on the county race track. Olivia, too, had grown older, and a great deal prettier. A chisel called the emotions, is always at work upon the human countenance—a face naturally humane and expressive grows more so, year by year.

It is not to be expected that she was very happy in that time. Life in the country, varied by short visits to watering places in the summer and occasionally to cities in the winter, is dull at best for a girl grown up in the whirl of civilization. There came a time—after Pembroke, taking Miles with him had gone to Washington, when life began to look very black to Olivia Berkeley's eyes. She suffered for want of an object in life. She loved