“What have you been doing there?” she asked.

“Mrs. Purling wanted a fan,” said Gilly readily.

She might want one fan, but hardly two; and had Phillipa been less flurried she might have noticed that Mrs. Purling had one already in her hand.  But then their Royal Highnesses arrived; the heiress made her curtsey for the first time in her life, was graciously received, and the hour of her apotheosis had actually come.  Presently the crowd became so dense that every inch of space was covered; people overflowed on to the landings, and sat four or five deep upon the stairs.  Dancing was simply impossible; however, hundreds of couples went through the form.  Phillipa, as in duty bound, remained in the thick of the melee, but Gilly had very early disappeared.  He preferred the card-room; his waltzing days were over, he said.  He was playing; it was not very good taste, but there were some men who preferred a quiet rubber to looking at princes or the antics of boys and girls, and he wished to oblige his friends.

“Can you give me a moment, Le Grice?” said Lord Camberwell, coming into the card-room.  “I have had a most extraordinary letter.  It accuses Gilly Jillingham—­”

“God bless my soul,” cried old Colonel Le Grice, “a letter of the same sort has been sent to me!”

“Have you had any suspicion that he played unfairly?”

“Not the slightest; I know he always holds the most surprising hands, that he plays for very high stakes, that he nearly always wins—­”

“Is he winning now?”

Of course.  Mr. Jillingham’s luck never deserted him.  He was trying now perhaps to make at one coup sufficient to silence for a further space his enemy’s tongue; the bets upon the odd trick alone amounted to a thousand or more.  But he was too late.  His hour had come.

Suddenly Lord Camberwell spoke in a loud peremptory voice: 

“Stop!  Mr. Jillingham is cheating.  He does it in the deal.  I have watched him now for three rounds.”

“And so have I,” added Colonel Le Grice.

Gilly sprang to his feet.  For a moment he seemed disposed to brazen it out; then he read his sentence in the face of those who had detected and now judged him.  There was no appeal:  he was doomed.  From henceforth he was socially and morally dead, and, without a word, he slunk away from the house.

The buzz of the ball-room soon caught up the ugly scandal, and tossed it wildly from lip to lip.  “Mr. Jillingham caught cheating at cards!” Everyone said, of course, they had suspected it all along; now every one knew it as a fact, except those most nearly concerned.  To them it came last.  To Phillipa, whose heart it stabbed as with a knife, cut through and through; then to Mrs. Purling, who, a little taken aback by the sudden exodus of her guests, asked innocently what it meant, upon which some one, without knowing who she was, told her the exact truth.