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Meanwhile poor Mr. Ahlberg, condemned to the solitude of the village tavern, varied by daily visits to The Beeches and occasional ones to his acquaintances, the Pembrokes and the Berkeleys, found life tedious. He wanted to get away, but Madame Koller would not let him. Mr. Ahlberg had now, for some years, had an eye to Madame Koller's fortune. Therefore, when she commanded him to stay, he stayed. He regarded her infatuation for Pembroke as a kind of temporary insanity, which would in time be cured, and that he would be the physician and would marry his patient afterward.

As for Madame Koller, she was wretched, anxious, everything but bored. That she was not—she was too miserable. Like Ahlberg, she thought herself almost a lunatic. Hers was not the folly of a guileless girl, but the deep-seated and unspeakable folly of a matured woman. When M. Koller died she had regarded herself as one of the most fortunate women in the world. Still young, rich, pretty, what more could she ask? The world had almost forgotten, if it ever knew, that she had had a stage career, when stage careers were not the most desirable things in the world. She had done her duty as well as she knew it by the dead and gone