"Is my cab there?" Grantley called to the butler.
"Not yet, sir; there'll be one directly."
"What club?" demanded Lady Harriet again.
"What does it matter? I haven't made up my mind. I'm only going to have a rubber."
Then it came—what Sibylla had been told about, what the others had seen before now. They were all forgotten—host and fellow-guests, even the servants, even the cabman, who heard the outburst and leant down from his high seat, trying to see. It was like some physical affliction, an utter loss of self-control; it was a bare step distant from violence. It was the failure of civilisation, the casting-off of decency, a being abandoned to a raw fierce fury.
"Club!" she cried, a deep flush covering her face and all her neck. "Pretty clubs you go to hard on midnight! I know you, I know you too well, you—you liar!"
Sibylla crept behind Grantley, passing her hand through his arm. Tom Courtland stood motionless, very white, a stiff smile on his lips.
"You liar!" she said once again, and without a look at any of them swept down the steps. She moved grandly. She came to the door of her brougham, which the footman held for her. The window was drawn up.
"Have you been driving with the windows shut?"
"Yes, my lady."