"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."