r servants like that.'

'Then why did you tell me just now you hadn't taken it?' Stephen
demanded crossly.

'I didn't feel well enough to argue with you then,' Vera replied.

'You've recovered precious quick,' retorted Stephen with grimness.

'Of course, if you want to make a scene before strangers,' Vera
whimpered (poor Charlie a stranger!), 'I'll go to bed.'

Stephen knew when he was beaten.

She went to the Hockey dance, though. She and Stephen and Charlie and
his young sister, aged seventeen, all descended together to the Town
Hall in a brougham. The young girl admired Vera's belt excessively, and
looked forward to the moment when she too should be a bewitching and
captivating wife like Vera, in short, a woman of the world, worshipped
by grave, bearded men. And both the men were under the spell of Vera's
incurable charm, capricious, surprising, exasperating, indefinable,
indispensable to their lives.

'Stupid superstitions!' reflected Vera. 'But of course I never believed
it really.'

And she cast down her eyes to gloat over the belt.

VERA'S SECOND CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE

I

Curious and strange things had a way of happening to Vera--perhaps
because she was an extremely feminine woman. But of all the curious and
strange things that ever did happen to Vera, this was certainly the
strangest and the most curious. It makes a somewhat exasperating
narrative, because the affair ended--or, rather, Vera caused it to
end--on a note of interrogation. The reader may, however, draw
consolation from the fact that, if he is tormented by an unanswerable
query, Vera herself was much more tormented by precisely the same query.

Two days before Christmas, at about three o'clock in the afternoon,
just when it was getting dusk and the distant smokepall of the Five
Towns was merging in the general greyness of the northern sky, Vera was
sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room of Stephen Cheswardine's
newly-acquired house at Sneyd; Sneyd being the fashionable suburb of
the Five Towns, graced by the near presence of a countess. And as the
slim, thirty-year-old Vera sat there, moody (for reasons which will
soon appear), in her charming teagown, her husband drove up to the door
in the dogcart, and he was not alone. He had with him a man of vigorous
and dashing appearance, fair, far from ugly, and with a masterful face,
keen eyes, and most magnificent furs round about him. At sight of the
visitor Vera's heart did not