My footsteps disturbed no one in the sleeping mews; and doubling back noiselessly through the passage, I took up my station beside the one low window which opened upon it from the blank back premises of the house.  Even with the glimmer of snow to help me, I had to grope for the window-sill to make sure of my bearings.  The minutes crawled by, and the only sound came from a stall where one of the horses had kicked through his thin straw bedding and was shuffling an uneasy hoof upon the cobbles.  Then just as I too had begun to shuffle my frozen feet, I heard a scratching sound, the unbolting of a shutter, and Gervase drew up the sash softly.

“Nip inside!” he whispered.  “No more noise than you can help.  I have sent off the night porter.  He tells me the bank is still going in the front of the house—­half-a-dozen playing, perhaps.”

I hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped inside.  The wall of this annexe—­which had no upper floor, and invited you to mistake it for a harmless studio—­was merely a sheath, so to speak.  Within, a corridor divided it from the true wall of the room:  and this room had no window or top-light, though a handsome one in the roof—­a dummy—­beguiled the eyes of its neighbours.

There was but one room:  an apartment of really fine proportions, never used by the tenants of the house, and known but to a few curious ones among its frequenters.

The story went that the late owner, Earl C—­, had reason to believe himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends, and in particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could hardly be accused to his face.  The Earl’s sense of honour forbade him to accuse any meaner man while the big culprit went unrebuked.  Therefore he continued to lose magnificently while he devised a new room for play:  the room in which I now followed Gervase.

I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and costly thoroughness of the Earl’s rebuke.  I had imagined him conducting his expectant guests to the door, ushering them in with a wave of the hand, and taking his seat tranquilly amid the dead, embarrassed silence:  had imagined him facing the Royal Duke and asking, “Shall we cut?” with a voice of the politest inflection.

For the room was a sheet of mirrors.  Mirrors panelled the walls, the doors, the very backs of the shutters.  The tables had mirrors for tops:  the whole ceiling was one vast mirror.  From it depended three great candelabra of cut-glass, set with reflectors here, there, and everywhere.

I had heard that even the floor was originally of polished brass.  If so, later owners must have ripped up the plates and sold them:  for now a few cheap Oriental rugs carpeted the unpolished boards.  The place was abominably dusty:  the striped yellow curtains had lost half their rings and drooped askew from their soiled vallances.  Across one of the wall-panels ran an ugly scar.  A smell of rat pervaded the air.  The present occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to games of chance, as they understood chance:  and I doubt if a servant entered it once a month.  Gervase had ordered candles and a fire:  but the chimney was out of practice, and the smoke wreathed itself slowly about us as we stood surrounded by the ghostly company of our reflected selves.