“Oh, well then, don’t say I said anything about it to you. No doubt she’ll tell you about it herself. She seemed very much upset, poor thing!”
In the meantime Audrey, who had a vague consciousness of the existence near her of some perfect organisation which worked out all its ends in an admirable way, recognised the fact that on this particular evening, when she was anxious to prove to Mrs. Webster the difficulty of her position, there was nothing whatever in the demeanour or the actions of her unwelcome visitors to give the slightest colour to her complaints.
One room was, indeed, set apart for cards, but no sounds of undue excitement came thence to the drawing-room, where music and conversation formed the entertainment of the rest of the guests.
Audrey was uneasy, excited, miserable, afraid that the sons of Lord Clanfield might insist upon defying her prohibition to the servants to admit them, and anxious yet nervous about the talk she must have with Mr. Candover.
In the meantime, while he was occupied in conversation with Mrs. Webster, Audrey had a shrewd yet vague suspicion that he was having it all his own way, and persuading the impressionable lady into taking exactly his own views.
Audrey passed through the long drawing-room and glanced into the end room at right angles with it, where the card-playing was going on.
By this time there were certain faces which she knew she might always be sure of seeing on these evenings, and she mentally made a note of them as she looked.
There was Lord Gourock, conspicuous for his perfectly bald head and the heavy white moustache which seemed to have absorbed all his powers of hair-producing. Passive as a statue, with dull yet not unobservant eyes, he sat there, apparently indifferent to whether he gained or lost, as long as he played.
There were two silly-looking youths who put on airs of blasé middle age, and who were, she knew, the sons of men who had made a great deal of money in trade. She knew that both of them always lost heavily, and she wished she could find an opportunity of pointing out to them how silly they were to go on playing in the circumstances. She supposed that they must both be very careless in play or very stupid, for the luck to be so constantly against them.
There was Durley Diggs, Mr. Candover’s secretary. He, too, generally complained of having lost, and always got into a state of great elation if he won two or three pounds. He did not care what he played at, poker, baccarat, roulette, it was all the same to him, and he went from table to table, always alert, neat, trim, bright of speech yet quiet in manner, and always perfectly equable of temper even when his fellow-players, as sometimes happened, grew peevish and ill-tempered.