As they walked along the road, fading into early dusk, and heard the wind sighing in the trim hedges and saw the lights of Curtain Wells seven miles away, Clare cursed that passion for cards which made a man forsake the bleak Spring fallows for pastures of green baize. But later when the huge cold sirloin that sailed in so sleek, sailed out like a battered wreck, and when pints of generous Burgundy had coloured life to its own rich hue, and when Mr. Daish himself had coaxed the fire to roar and blaze up the chimney, and set out the walnuts and put half a dozen ample chairs round the fire, Mr. Clare could not resist the universal content, but must laugh and make merry and relate the events of the day for the seventh time, with as much zest as any of the returned heroes. Charles had surely been winning: he was so flushed and talked so loudly. Actually he did not possess a penny, and what was worse, owed Mr. Vernon a couple of hundred guineas. Not much, but enough when you have only cloaths to sell, and not a prospect in the world. Presently one by one the hunters dropped off to sleep with legs outstretched and doffed wigs and long church-wardens' pipes, that one by one dropped from slowly opening mouths, slid along unbuttoned waistcoats and snapped their slender stems upon the floor, until everybody except Mr. Vernon and our hero was snoring the eighth repetition of the events of that famous day. The room was hot; the drawing of many breaths thick with fatigue, beef and Burgundy induced a meditative atmosphere; the fire no longer blazed, but sank to an intense crimson glow. Mr. Vernon counted up his gains, while Mr. Lovely pondered his losses in silence. At last the latter got up suddenly. "The cards?" inquired Mr. Vernon. "Not to-night. I think I'll take the air," Charles replied. "As you will," said the other and betook himself once more to his tablets. Charles paused for a moment outside the Coffee-Room to take down his full black cloak and three-cornered hat. The night wind had brought in its track a melancholy drizzle of rain that suited his own melancholy mood. He wandered rather vaguely across the wide inn-yard, passed under the arch and sauntered along the deserted High Street. To tell the truth, Mr. Lovely was very unpleasantly situated at this period. His father had been the ne'er-do-weel survivor of a long line of country squires away down in Devonshire. When he had eloped with Miss Joan Repington, to the eternal chagrin of the young lady's brother, a rich banker knighted for his loyal support of the Protestant Succession, Valentine Lovely ran through his own and his wife's fortune in the first six years of matrimony. Thence onwards they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, dependent on Valentine's luck at the tables and the inviolableness of an aunt's legacy of five thousand guineas.