er than he had shown
when he left her, and that she would carry her point after all.

Now, naturally, when a husband in easy circumstances, the possessor of
a pretty and pampered wife, spends a week in London and returns five
days before Christmas, certain things are rightly and properly to be
expected from him. It would need an astounding courage, an amazing lack
of a sense of the amenity of conjugal existence in such a husband to
enable him to disappoint such reasonable expectations. And Cheswardine,
though capable of pulling the curb very tight on the caprices of his
wife, was a highly decent fellow. He had no intention to disappoint; he
knew his duty.

So that during afternoon tea with the teagown in a cosy corner of the
great Chippendale drawing-room he began to unfasten a small wooden case
which he had brought into the house in his own hand, opened it with
considerable precaution, making a fine mess of packing-stuff on the
carpet, and gradually drew to light a pair of vases of Venetian glass.
He put them on the mantlepiece.

'There!' he said, proudly, and with a virtuous air.

They were obviously costly antique vases, exquisite in form, exquisite
in the graduated tints of their pale blue and rose.

'Seventeenth century!' he said.

'They're very nice,' Vera agreed, with a show of enthusiasm. 'What are
they for?'

'Your Christmas present,' Cheswardine explained, and added 'my dear!'

'Oh, Stephen!' she murmured.

A kiss on these occasions is only just, and Cheswardine had one.

'Duveens told me they were quite unique,' he said, modestly; 'and I
believe 'em.'

You might imagine that a pair of Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century, stated by Duveens to be unique, would have satisfied a woman
who had a generous dress allowance and lacked absolutely nothing that
was essential. But Vera was not satisfied. She was, on the contrary,
profoundly disappointed. For the presence of those vases proved that
she had not carried her point. They deprived her of hope. The
unpleasantness before Cheswardine went to London had been more or less
a propos of a Christmas present. Vera had seen in Bostock's vast
emporium in the neighbouring town of Hanbridge, a music-stool in the
style known as art nouveau, which had enslaved her fancy. She had taken
her husband to see it, and it had not enslaved her husband's fancy in
the slightest degree. It was made in light woods, and the woods were
curved and twisted as though they ha