"Too big to carry away unobserved, and too big to be stowed away in a coat, I take it," said Captain Lennox. "How large was it, Cleeve?--you saw it, I think. The fellow must have disposed of the articles about his pockets."
"How large?" repeated Philip, who was sitting with his chair tilted and his head thrown back, puffing forth volumes of smoke in silence, "oh--about that large"--making a movement with his hand. "Just give me my coffee-cup, will you, Freddy?"
Later, the party sat down to cards. They began by playing Napoleon, as on the previous evening; but this was changed for the still more dangerous game of Unlimited Loo. At neither one game nor the other was Philip Cleeve anything like a match for those experienced players, Camberley and Lennox, and he grew nervous and excitable. When the party broke up Philip had not only lost the twenty-five pounds given him in the morning by his mother, but fifteen pounds more, for which Lord Camberley held his IOU. As for Freddy Bootle, he did not much care for cards, and he played with a severe indifference to either the smiles or frowns of fortune: if he lost, it was a matter of little consequence to him; if he won, it was a few sovereigns more in the pocket of a man who had already more money than he knew what to do with.
Philip rose from the table with haggard eyes, flushed face, and trembling hands.
"I will redeem my scrap of paper in the morning," he remarked to his lordship.
"All right, old man: you will find me in the billiard-room about four o'clock," answered Camberley. "Only look here, there's no need to be in such a desperate hurry, you know."
He had a dim suspicion that Philip was not over well-off in money matters.
"I shall be in the billiard-room at four," retorted Philip with some hauteur.
He resented the implication in Camberley's words--that perhaps it might not be convenient to pay the fifteen pounds so quickly. His poverty was a matter that concerned no one but himself.
As he walked home alone under the cold light of the stars, and went back in memory to the events of this evening and the last, they seemed to him nothing more than a wretched phantasmagoria, in which only the ghost of his real self had played a part. He was a loser to the extent of forty pounds. And where was he to raise the twenty-five pounds for Tiplady, or the fifteen for Camberley?