Oldcastle, and was
taking Miss Callear with him for the run, this being Miss Callear's
weekly afternoon off. Miss Callear had come to Bursley in the electric
tram.
Vera shook with swift anger; not at Felix's information, but the patent
fact that Mary Callear was wearing a hat which was the exact replica of
the hat on Vera's own head. And Mary Callear was seated like a duchess
in the car, while Vera stood on the gravel. And two of Vera's new
servants were there to see that Vera was wearing a hat precisely
equivalent to the hat of a chambermaid!
She went abruptly into the house and sought for Stephen--as with a
sword. But Stephen was not discoverable. She ran to her elegant new
bedroom and shut herself in. She understood the plot. She had plenty of
wit. Stephen had concerted it with Felix. In spite of Stephen's
allegations of innocence, the hat had been sent somewhere--probably to
Brunt's at Hanbridge--to be copied at express speed, and Stephen had
presented the copy to Felix, in order that Felix might present it to
Mary Callear the chambermaid, and the meeting in the front garden had
been deliberately arranged by that odious male, Stephen. Truly, she had
not believed Stephen capable of such duplicity and cruelty.
She removed the hat, gazed at it, and then tore it to pieces and
scattered the pieces on the carpet.
An hour later Stephen crept into the bedroom and beheld the fragments,
and smiled.
'Stephen,' she exclaimed, 'you're a horrid, cruel brute.' 'I know I
am,' said Stephen. 'You ought to have found that out long since.'
'I won't love you any more. It's all over,' she sobbed. But he just
kissed her.
VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE
I
Five days before Christmas, Cheswardine came home to his wife from a
week's sojourn in London on business. Vera, in her quality of the
best-dressed woman in Bursley, met him on the doorstep (or thereabouts)
of their charming but childless home, attired in a teagown that would
have ravished a far less impressionable male than her husband; while
he, in his quality of a prosaic and flourishing earthenware
manufacturer, pretended to take the teagown as a matter of course, and
gave her the sober, solid kiss of a man who has been married six years
and is getting used to it.
Still, the teagown had pleased him, and by certain secret symptoms Vera
knew that it had pleased him. She hoped much from that teagown. She
hoped that he had come home in a more pacific temp
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