‘Then why did you tell me just now you hadn’t taken it?’ Stephen demanded crossly.

‘I didn’t feel well enough to argue with you then,’ Vera replied.

‘You’ve recovered precious quick,’ retorted Stephen with grimness.

‘Of course, if you want to make a scene before strangers,’ Vera whimpered (poor Charlie a stranger!), ‘I’ll go to bed.’

Stephen knew when he was beaten.

She went to the Hockey dance, though.  She and Stephen and Charlie and his young sister, aged seventeen, all descended together to the Town Hall in a brougham.  The young girl admired Vera’s belt excessively, and looked forward to the moment when she too should be a bewitching and captivating wife like Vera, in short, a woman of the world, worshipped by grave, bearded men.  And both the men were under the spell of Vera’s incurable charm, capricious, surprising, exasperating, indefinable, indispensable to their lives.

‘Stupid superstitions!’ reflected Vera.  ’But of course I never believed it really.’

And she cast down her eyes to gloat over the belt.

VERA’S SECOND CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE

Curious and strange things had a way of happening to Vera—­ perhaps because she was an extremely feminine woman.  But of all the curious and strange things that ever did happen to Vera, this was certainly the strangest and the most curious.  It makes a somewhat exasperating narrative, because the affair ended—­or, rather, Vera caused it to end—­on a note of interrogation.  The reader may, however, draw consolation from the fact that, if he is tormented by an unanswerable query, Vera herself was much more tormented by precisely the same query.

Two days before Christmas, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, just when it was getting dusk and the distant smokepall of the Five Towns was merging in the general greyness of the northern sky, Vera was sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room of Stephen Cheswardine’s newly-acquired house at Sneyd; Sneyd being the fashionable suburb of the Five Towns, graced by the near presence of a countess.  And as the slim, thirty-year-old Vera sat there, moody (for reasons which will soon appear), in her charming teagown, her husband drove up to the door in the dogcart, and he was not alone.  He had with him a man of vigorous and dashing appearance, fair, far from ugly, and with a masterful face, keen eyes, and most magnificent furs round about him.  At sight of the visitor Vera’s heart did not exactly jump, but it nearly jumped.

Presently, Stephen brought his acquaintance into the drawing-room.

“My wife,” said Stephen, rubbing his hands.  “Vera, this is Mr Bittenger, of New York.  He will give us the pleasure of spending the night here.”

And now Vera’s little heart really did jump.

She behaved with the delicious wayward grace which she could always command when she chose to command it.  No one would have guessed that she had not spoken to Stephen for a week.