‘There’s a deuced odd smell from it,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it’s the wood!’ she faltered.

‘I hope it isn’t,’ he said.  ’I expect it’s the straw.  A deuced odd smell.  We’ll have the thing put in the side hall, next to the clock.  It will be out of the way there.  And I can come and gaze at it when I feel depressed.  Eh, Maria?’ He was undoubtedly charmed at the prospect of owning so large and precious a cigar-cabinet.

Considering that the parcel which she had given to Penkethman to put in the music-stool comprised a half-a-pound of Bostock’s very ripest Gorgonzola cheese, bought at the cook’s special request, the smell which proceeded from the mysterious inwards of the packing-case did not surprise Vera at all.  But it disconcerted her none the less.  And she wondered how she could get the cheese out.

For thirty hours the smell from the unopened packing-case waxed in vigour and strength.  Stephen’s cold grew worse and prevented him from appreciating its full beauty, but he savoured enough of it to induce him to compare it facetiously to the effluvium of a dead rat, and he said several times that Bostock’s really ought to use better straw.  He was frequently to be seen in the hall, gloating over his cigar-cabinet.  Once he urged Vera to have it opened and so get rid of the straw, but she refused, and found the nerve to tell him that he was exaggerating the odour.

She was at a loss what to do.  She could not get up in the middle of the night and unpack the package and hide its guilty secret.  Indeed, to unpack the package would bring about her ruin instantly; for, the package unpacked, Stephen would naturally expect to see the cigar-cabinet.  And so the hours crept on to Christmas and Vera’s undoing.  She gave herself a headache.

It was just thirty hours after the arrival of the package when Mr Woodruff dropped in for tea.  Stephen was asleep in the dining-room, which apartment he particularly affected during his colds.  Woodruff was shown into the drawing-room, where Vera was having her headache.  Vera brightened.  In fact, she suddenly grew very bright.  And she gave Woodruff tea, and took some herself, and Woodruff passed an enjoyable twenty minutes.

The two Venetian vases were on the mantelpiece.  Vera rose into ecstasies about them, and called upon Charlie Woodruff to rise too.  He got up from his chair to examine the vases, which Vera had placed close together side by side at the corner of the mantelpiece nearest to him.  Vera and Woodruff also stood close together side by side.  And just as Woodruff was about to handle the vases, Vera knocked his arm; his arm collided with one vase; that vase collided with the next, and both fell to earth—­to the hard, unfeeling, unyielding tiles of the hearth.

IV

They were smashed to atoms.

Vera screamed.  She screamed twice, and ran out of the room.