PART V - VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE - CHAPTER IV

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They were smashed to atoms.

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

'Stephen, Stephen!' she cried hysterically. 'Charlie has broken my
vases, both of them. It IS too bad of him. He's really too
clumsy!'

There was a terrific pother. Stephen wakened violently, and in a
moment all three were staring ineffectually at the thousand
crystal fragments on the hearth.

'But--' began Charlie Woodruff.

And that was all he did say.

He and Vera and Stephen had been friends since infancy, so she had
the right not to conceal her feelings before him; Stephen had the
same right. They both exercised it.

'But--' began Charlie again.

'Oh, never mind,' Stephen stopped him curtly. 'Accidents can't be
helped.'

'I shall get another pair,' said Woodruff.

'No, you won't,' replied Stephen. 'You can't. There isn't another
pair in the world. See?'

The two men simultaneously perceived that Vera was weeping. She
was very pretty in tears, but that did not prevent the masculine
world from feeling awkward and self-conscious. Charlie had notions
about going out and burying himself.

'Come, Vera, come,' her husband enjoined, blowing his nose with
unnecessary energy, bad as his cold was.

'I--I liked those vases more than anything you've--you've ever
given me,' Vera blubbered, charmingly, patting her eyes.

Stephen glanced at Woodruff, as who should say: 'Well, my boy, you
uncorked those tears, I'll leave you to deal with 'em. You see,
I'm an invalid in a dressing-gown. I leave you.'

And went.

'No-but-look-here-I-say,' Charlie Woodruff expostulated to Vera
when he was alone with her--he often started an expostulation with
that singular phrase. 'I'm awfully sorry. I don't know how it
happened. You must let me give you something else.'

Vera shook her head.

'No,' she said. 'I wanted Stephen awfully to give me that music-
stool that I told you about a fortnight ago. But he gave me the
vases instead, and I liked them ever so much better.'

'I shall give you the music-stool. If you wanted it a fortnight
ago, you want it now. It won't make up for the vases, of course,
but--'

'No, no,' said Vera, positively.

'Why not?'

'I do not wish you to give me anything. It wouldn't be quite
nice,' Vera insisted.

'But I give you something every Christmas.'

'Do you?' asked Vera, innocently.

'Yes, and you and Stephen give me something.'

'Besides, Stephen doesn't quite like the music-stool.'

'What's that got to do with it? You like it. I'm giving it to you,
not to him. I shall go over to Bostock's tomorrow morning and get
it.'

'I forbid you to.'

'I shall.'

Woodruff departed.

Within five minutes the Cheswardine coachman was driving off in
the dogcart to Hanbridge, with the packing-case in the back of the
cart, and a note. He brought back the cigar-cabinet. Stephen had
not stirred from the dining-room, afraid to encounter a tearful
wife. Presently his wife came into the dining-room bearing the
vast load of the cigar-cabinet in her delicate arms.

'I thought it might amuse you to fill it with your cigars--just to
pass the time,' she said.

Stephen's thought was: 'Well, women take the cake.' It was a
thought that occurs frequently to the husbands of Veras.

There was ripe Gorgonzola at dinner. Stephen met it as one meets a
person whom one fancies one has met somewhere but cannot remember
where.

The next afternoon the music-stool came, for the second time, into
the house. Charlie brought it in HIS dogcart. It was unpacked
ostentatiously by the radiant Vera. What could Stephen say in
depreciation of this gift from their oldest and best friend? As a
fact he could and did say a great deal. But he said it when he
happened to be all alone in the drawing-room, and had observed the
appalling way in which the music-stool did not 'go' with the
Chippendale.

'Look at the d--thing!' he exclaimed to himself. 'Look at it!'

However, the Christmas dinner-party was a brilliant success, and
after it Vera sat on the art nouveau music-stool and twittered
songs, and what with her being so attractive and birdlike, and
what with the Christmas feeling in the air... well, Stephen
resigned himself to the music-stool.

Read next: PART VI - THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN: CHAPTER I

Read previous: PART V - VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE: CHAPTER III

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