The day wore on, and by dint of spinning things out most unconscionably it was dusk of the clear autumn evening before the cavalcade took the dusty white road toward home. In “the Isleham carriage” Colonel Berkeley leaned back and waxed confidential with his daughter. “My dear, Eliza Peyton--Madame Koller I should say--is what you young sprigs call green--excessively green. She imagines because I am old I am a fool. And that precious scamp, Ahlberg--” “Why do you call him a scamp, papa?” “Why do I call Petrarch an African?” “Mrs. Peyton seems to have some kind of a prejudice to Mr. Ahlberg, too.” “Aha, trust Sally Peyton to see for herself. She’s devilish tricky, is Sally Peyton--not that I have any cause to complain of it--none whatever. She’s very sharp. But we’ll go and call some day on Eli--Madame Koller. She’s not bad company for the country--and I’ve heard she could sing, too.” “Yes, we will go,” answered Olivia, suppressing a yawn. “It’s in the country, as you say.” CHAPTER II. DOES anybody ever ask what becomes of the _prime donne_ who break down early? Madame Koller could have told something about their miseries, from the first struggling steps up to the pinnacle when they can fight with managers, down again to the point when the most dreadful sound that nature holds--so she thought--a hiss--laid them figuratively among the dead. Nature generally works methodically, but in Madame Koller’s case, she seemed to take a delight in producing grapes from thorns. Without one atom of artistic heredity, surroundings or atmosphere to draw upon, Eliza Peyton had come into the world an artist. She had a voice, and she grew up with the conviction that there was nothing in the world but voices and pianos. It is not necessary to repeat how in her girlhood, by dint of her widowed mother marrying a third rate German professor, she got to Munich and to Milan--nor how the voice, at first astonishingly pure and beautiful, suddenly lost its pitch, then disappeared altogether. It is true that after a time it came back to her partially. She could count on it for an hour at a time, but no more. Of course there was no longer any career for her, and she nearly went crazy with grief--then she consoled herself with M. Koller, an elderly Swiss manufacturer. In some way, although she was young and handsome and accomplished, she found in her continental travels that the best Americans and English avoided the Kollers. This she rashly attributed to the fact of her having had a brief professional career, and she became as anxious to conceal it as she had once been anxious to pursue it. M. Koller was a hypochondriac, and went from Carlsbad to Wiesbaden, from Wiesbaden to Hyéres, from Hyéres to Aix-les-Bains. He was always fancying himself dying, but one day at Vichy, death came quite unceremoniously and claimed him just as he had made up his mind to get well. Thus Eliza Koller found herself a widow, still young and