“The old gentleman sat down in the midst of a stunned silence. It was, of course, an atrocious thing that he had done. On their very wedding day to suggest that the love of the bridal pair might not last forever! Craig’s face was pale and his lips were tightly compressed; on Amy’s cheeks burned two angry red spots. But, as I have said before, when one has a relative who is very old and also very wealthy, it is astonishing how lenient one becomes toward his lapses from what one believes to be the correct standards of taste and conduct. Neither Craig nor his wife spoke; the silence lasted yet another moment, then some one made a remark, which, however pointless, at least had the merit of provoking a general conversation, in the course of which old Forsythe and his crudeness were ignored by general consent. “A little later Craig found his wife upstairs, just as she had donned her traveling dress. Uncle Robert, of course, was not there; and Craig permitted himself to become quite angry. The flask stood sparkling in the sunlight, on a little table where Amy had placed it on coming into the room. Craig would have smashed it to pieces, but Amy stayed his hand. “‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘your uncle may ask for it when he comes to see us, and we could not afford to offend him by telling him we had destroyed it.’ “The fact that it was she who saved the flask from destruction, afterwards seemed to Craig a rare bit of irony; but at the time he saw only an early proof of the wise, semi-maternal interest every good wife takes in her husband’s affairs, and he found it so inexpressibly touching that, instead of smashing the flask, he kissed his wife. “Nevertheless, they did not exhibit old Forsythe’s wedding gift conspicuously in their drawing-room, though it was there that they found it greeting them upon returning from their trip. What to do with it was quite a problem until Mrs. Craig found a vacant space behind a row of books in the library, and there it was promptly bestowed. You see, as a hiding-place, this spot had two great virtues: it hid, which is a requisite of all hiding-places, and it allowed the flask to be quickly produced in case of Uncle Robert’s visits, which was a requisite of this particular hiding-place.