Then guests began to pour in. Where was Phillipa? Very late; she might have dressed earlier. A servant was sent to call her, and Phillipa, hurrying down, met Gilly on the upper floor coming out of Mrs. Purling's bedroom.
"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 mêlée, 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.