“It is perfectly disgraceful!” she said, “and now I don’t really know what has happened.  On Easter Sunday night, too!”

Molly had been standing by the window, looking out on the moonlit park.  She now leaned further across the wide window-seat, so that her slight, sea-green silk-clad figure might not be obtrusive, and the dark keen face was turned away for the same purpose.

“That woman has actually,” Lady Groombridge went on, “been playing cards in the smoking-room on Easter Sunday night with Billy and those two boys.  What Groombridge will say, I can’t conceive; it is perfectly disgraceful!”

“Have they been playing for much?”

“Oh, for anything, I suppose; and Edmund Grosse says that the boy from the Parsonage has lost any amount to Billy.  They have fleeced him in the most disgraceful way.”

There was a long silence.  Rose looked utterly distressed.

“If he had only refused to play,” she said at last, as if she wished to return in imagination to a happier state of things.

“It’s no use saying that now,” said Lady Groombridge, with an air of ineffable wisdom.

Molly Dexter bit her tiny evening handkerchief, and her grey eyes laughed at the moonlight.

“Well, Rose, I can’t say you are much comfort to me,” the hostess went on presently, with a dawn of humour on her countenance as she crossed one leg over the other.

“But, my dear, what can I say?”

The tall, white figure, brush in hand, rose and stood over the elderly woman in the chair.  Rose had had the healthy development of a girlhood in the country, but her regular features were more deeply marked now and there were dark lines under her clear, blue eyes.

“Do you think,” said the hostess in a brooding way, “that Mrs. What’s-her-name Green would tell you how much he lost, Rose, if you went to her room?  Of course, I can’t possibly ask her.”

“Oh no; she thinks me a goody-goody old frump.”

At the same moment another brush at the splendid hair betrayed a half-consciousness of the grace of her own movements.

“She wouldn’t say a word to me—­she is much more likely to tell one of the men.  Perhaps she will tell Edmund Grosse to-morrow; he is so easy to talk to.”

“But that’s no use for to-night, and Groombridge will be simply furious if I ask him to interfere without telling him how much it comes to.  Billy won’t say a word.”

“I think,” said Rose very slowly, “that if we all go to bed now, we shall have some bright idea in the morning.”

Before this master-stroke of suggestion had reached Lady Groombridge’s brain, a very low voice came from the window.

“Would you like me to go and ask her?”

The hostess started; she had forgotten Miss Molly Dexter.  A little dull blush rose to her forehead.

“Oh dear, I had forgotten you were there; but, after all, she is no relation of yours, and it isn’t your fault, you know.  Could you—­would you really not mind asking her?”