And there was the chambermaid walking up the drive, quite calmly!  Felix, also quite calmly, asked Vera to excuse him, and told the chambermaid to get into the car and sit beside him.  He then informed Vera that he had to go with the car immediately to 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 temper than he had shown when he left her, and that she would carry her point after all.