Tonight it was champagne.

Woodruff opened it, as he always did, and involuntarily poured out a libation on the hearth, as he almost always did.  Good-natured, ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art of opening champagne.

Mrs Cheswardine tapped her pink-slippered foot impatiently.

‘You’re all nerves tonight,’ Woodruff laughed, ’and you’ve made me nervous,’ And at length he got some of the champagne into a tumbler.

‘No, I’m not,’ Mrs Cheswardine contradicted him.

‘Yes, you are, Vera,’ Woodruff insisted calmly.

She smiled.  The use of that elegant Christian name, with its faint suggestion of Russian archduchesses, had a strange effect on her, particularly from the lips of Woodruff.  She was proud of it, and of her surname too—­one of the oldest surnames in the Five Towns.  The syllables of ‘Vera’ invariably soothed her, like a charm.  Woodruff, and Cheswardine also, had called her Vera during the whole of her life; and she was thirty.  They had all three lived in different houses at the top end of Trafalgar Road, Bursley.  Woodruff fell in love with her first, when she was eighteen, but with no practical result.  He was a brown-haired man, personable despite his ungainliness, but he failed to perceive that to worship from afar off is not the best way to capture a young woman with large eyes and an emotional disposition.  Cheswardine, who had a black beard, simply came along and married the little thing.  She fluttered down on to his shoulders like a pigeon.  She adored him, feared him, cooed to him, worried him, and knew that there were depths of his mind which she would never plumb.  Woodruff, after being best man, went on loving, meekly and yet philosophically, and found his chief joy in just these suppers.  The arrangement suited Vera; and as for the husband and the hopeless admirer, they had always been fast friends.

‘I asked you what you were saying about murder,’ said Vera sharply, ‘but it seems—­’

‘Oh! did you?’ Woodruff apologized.  ’I was saying that murder isn’t such an impossible thing as it appears.  Anyone might commit a murder.’

’Then you want to defend, Harrisford?  Do you hear what he says, Stephen?’

The notorious and terrible Harrisford murders were agitating the Five Towns that November.  People read, talked, and dreamt murder; for several weeks they took murder to all their meals.

‘He doesn’t want to defend Harrisford at all,’ said Cheswardine, with a superior masculine air, ’and of course anyone might commit a murder.  I might.’

‘Stephen!  How horrid you are!’ ‘You might, even!’ said Woodruff, gazing at Vera.

‘Charlie!  Why, the blood alone—­’

‘There isn’t always blood,’ said the oracular husband.

‘Listen here,’ proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed philosophical speculation.  ’Supposing that by just taking thought, by just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China and make himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything about it!  How many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in China at the end of a week!’