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 had recently spent seven years in a purgatory for sinful trees.  Here and there in the design onyx-stones had been set in the wood.  The seat itself was beautifully soft.  What captured Vera was chiefly the fact that it did not open at the top, as most elaborate music-stools do, but at either side.  You pressed a button (onyx) and the panel fell down displaying your music in little compartments ready to hand; and the eastern moiety of the music-stool was for piano pieces, and the western moiety for songs.  In short, it was the last word of music-stools; nothing could possibly be newer.