Mrs. Pevenly had finished her breakfast at about half-past nine, by which hour her daughter had not put in an appearance; as the hostess and most of the members of the house-party were equally late, Beryl’s slackness could not be regarded as a social sin, but her mother thought it was a pity to lose so much of the fine October morning. Beryl Pevenly had been described by someone as the “Flapper incarnate,” and the label summed her up accurately. Her mother already recognised that she was disposed to be a law unto herself; what she did not yet realise was that Beryl was extremely likely to be a lawgiver to any weaker character with whom she might come in contact. “She is only a child yet,” Mrs. Pevenly would say to herself, forgetting that seventeen and seventy are about the two most despotic ages of human life.
“Ah, finished breakfast at last!” she called out in mock reproof as her daughter came out to join her in the rose-walk; “if you had gone to bed in good time these last two evenings, as I did, you would not be so tired in the morning. It has been so fresh and charming out here, while all you silly people have been lying in bed. I hope you weren’t playing bridge for high stakes, my dear!”
There was a tired defiant look in Beryl’s eyes that drew forth the anxious remark.
“Bridge? No, we started with a rubber or two the night before last,” said Beryl, “but we switched off to baccarat. Rather a mistake for some of us.”
“Beryl, you haven’t been losing?” asked Mrs. Pevenly with increased anxiety in her voice.
“I lost quite a lot the first evening,” said Beryl, “and as I couldn’t possibly pay my losses I simply punted the next evening to try and get them back; I’ve come to the conclusion that baccarat is not my game. I came a bigger cropper on the second evening than on the first.”
“Beryl, this is awful! I’m very angry with you. Tell me quickly, how much have you lost?”
Beryl looked at a slip of paper that she was twisting and untwisting in her hands.
“Three hundred and ten the first night, seven hundred and sixteen the second,” she announced.
“Three hundred what?”
“Pounds.”
“Pounds!” screamed the mother; “Beryl, I don’t believe you. Why, that is a thousand pounds!”
“A thousand and twenty-six to be exact,” said Beryl.
Mrs. Pevenly was too frightened to cry.
“Where do you suppose,” she asked, “that we could raise a thousand pounds, or anything like a thousand pounds? We are living at the top of our income, we are practising all sorts of economies, we simply couldn’t subtract a thousand pounds from our little capital. It would ruin us.”
“We should be socially ruined if it got about that we played for stakes that we couldn’t or wouldn’t pay; no one would ask us anywhere.”
“How came you to do such a dreadful thing?” wailed the mother.
“Oh, it’s no use asking those sort of questions,” said Beryl; “the thing is done. I suppose I inherit a gambling instinct from some of you.”
“You certainly don’t,” exclaimed Mrs. Pevenly hotly; “your father never touched cards or cared anything about horse-racing, and I don’t know one game of cards from another.”
“These things skip a generation sometimes, and come out all the stronger in the next batch,” said Beryl; “how about that uncle of yours who used to get up a sweepstake every Sunday at school as to which of the books of the Bible the text for the sermon would be taken from? If he wasn’t a keen gambler I’ve never heard of one.”
“Don’t let’s argue,” faltered the elder woman, “let’s think of what is to be done. How many people do you owe the money to?”
“Luckily it’s all due to one person, Ashcombe Gwent,” said Beryl; “he was doing nearly all the winning on both nights. He’s rather a good sort in his way, but unluckily he isn’t a bit well off, and one couldn’t expect him to overlook the fact that money was owing to him. I fancy he’s just as much of an adventurer as we are.”
“We are not adventurers,” protested Mrs. Pevenly.
“People who come to stay at country houses and play for stakes that they’ve no prospect of paying if they lose, are adventurers,” said Beryl, who seemed determined to include her mother in any moral censure that might be applied to her own conduct.
“Have you said anything to him about the difficulty you are in?”
“I have. That’s what I’ve come to tell you about. We had a talk this morning in the billiard-room after breakfast. It seems there is just one way out of the tangle. He’s inclined to be amorous.”
“Amorous!” exclaimed the mother.
“Matrimonially amorous,” said the daughter; “in fact, without either of us having guessed it, it appears that he’s the victim of an infatuation.”
“He has certainly been polite and attentive,” said Mrs. Pevenly; “he is not a man who says much, but he listens to what one has to say. And do you mean that he really wants to marry—?”
“That is exactly what he does want,” said Beryl. “I don’t know that he is the sort of husband that one woud rave about, but I gather that he has enough to live on—as much as we’re accustomed to, anyhow, and he’s quite presentable to look at. The alternative is selling out a big chunk of our little capital; I should have to go and be a governess or typewriter or something, and you would have to do needlework. From just making things do, and paying rounds of visits and having a fairly good time, we should sink suddenly to the unfortunate position of distressed gentlefolk. I don’t know what
