ing excited in advance.
The servants weren't going to have a dinner-party, with crackers and
port and a table-centre unmatched in the Five Towns; the servants
weren't going to invite their friends to an evening's jollity. The
servants were merely going to work somewhat harder and have somewhat
less sleep; but such is the magical effect of holly and mistletoe
twined round picture-cords and hung under chandeliers that the
excitement of the servants was entirely pleasurable.

And as Vera shut the bedroom door, she said, with a delightful,
forgiving smile---

'I saw a lovely cigar-cabinet at Bostock's yesterday.'

'Oh!' said Cheswardine, touched. He had no cigar-cabinet, and he wanted
one, and Vera knew that he wanted one.

And Vera slept in the sweet consciousness of her thoughtful wifeliness.

The next morning, at breakfast, Cheswardine demanded--

'Getting pretty hard up, aren't you, Maria?'

He called her Maria when he wished to be arch.

Well,' she said, 'as a matter of fact, I am. What with the--'

And he gave her a five-pound note.

It happened so every year. He provided her with the money to buy him a
Christmas present. But it is, I hope, unnecessary to say that the
connection between her present to him and the money he furnished was
never crudely mentioned.

She made an opportunity, before he left for the works, to praise the
Venetian vases, and she insisted that he should wrap up well, because
he was showing signs of one of his bad colds.

II

In the early afternoon she went to Bostock's emporium, at Hanbridge, to
buy the cigar-cabinet and a few domestic trifles. Bostock's is a good
shop. I do not say that it has the classic and serene dignity of
Brunt's, over the way, where one orders one's dining-room suites and
one's frocks for the January dances. But it is a good shop, and one of
the chief glories of the Paris of the Five Towns. It has frontages in
three streets, and it might be called the shop of the hundred windows.
You can buy pretty nearly anything at Bostock's, from an art nouveau
music-stool up to the highest cheese--for there is a provision
department. (You can't get cheese at Brunt's.)

Vera made her uninteresting purchases first, in the basement, and then
she went up-stairs to the special Christmas department, which certainly
was wonderful: a blaze and splendour of electric light; a glitter of
gilded iridescent toys and knick-knacks; a smiling, excited, pushing
multitude of f