The entrance of the hostess came as a relief. That lady, without
glancing at Rose or Molly as she came into the middle of the room,
banged the candlestick down on a small table, and then threw herself
into an arm-chair, which gave a creak of sympathy in response to her
loud sigh.

"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.