Page:The Berkeleys and their neighbors.djvu/85

 Madame Koller raised her hand—it was large and strong and white—and brought it down upon the clergyman's cheek with a thundering whack that would have knocked him down, but for another slap she administered on the other side. Pembroke had not been in time to save him, but he caught Cole by the collar, and picking him up as if he had been a baby, set him out of the way.

Madame Koller was raging. She stamped her foot and clinched her hands and ground her teeth with passion.

"Come, Madame Koller," said Pembroke, sternly, "there is no occasion for this sort of thing. The little fool is tipsy—of course you see it. You ought not to have had anything to say to him."

But Madame Koller would not be pacified. It was not the liberty he had tried to take which most infuriated her, she inadvertently declared, but the idea that she, Elise Koller, would marry a country parson. She raved. What! She, Elise Koller, born a Peyton, should condescend to that ridiculous person? What would her aunt, Sally Peyton, say to it? What would the shade of the departed Koller say to it? She had been civil to him, and forsooth, he had come, like a thief in the night, and proposed to marry her—her, who might have married a duke—a prince—anybody. Madame Koller was very mad, and used just the extravagant and hysterical language that people of her type do sometimes.

As for Mr. Cole, those two slaps had sobered him