Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/10

 speaking, she pushed down the long gray glove on her right arm, glancing at her bracelet watch. "We're very early," she went on. "We must have walked faster than we thought. We allowed ourselves too much time."

In pulling down her glove, Lady Hereward dropped something which fell noiselessly upon a polar-bear rug, and lay glittering, half buried in the silver-white fur. "My vanity box!" she exclaimed. "Stupid of me! I'm always dropping it." The butler stooped rheumatically to pick up the little gold case, but the lady's husband was before him, and the old servant pottered away to call his mistress, thinking, as he had often thought before, how charmingly courteous Colonel Sir Ian Hereward invariably was to his wife. She liked and needed a good deal of attention, a good deal of waiting upon, as the observant Brewster was well aware; yet Sir Ian never failed, never seemed bored or impatient, as many husbands did after years of marriage. But then, if he were more devoted than ordinary husbands, her ladyship was more attractive than ordinary wives. Not that she was precisely beautiful, nor was she precisely young. Every one knew the distinguished officer's age—forty-one; and Lady Hereward was said to be some months older than Sir Ian, who was her distant cousin as well as her husband; but she did not look a day over thirty; and if she were not a beauty, she was interesting and