ash softly.

"Nip inside!" he whispered. "No more noise than you can help. I have
sent off the night porter. He tells me the bank is still going in the
front of the house--half-a-dozen playing, perhaps."

I hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped inside. The wall of this
annexe--which had no upper floor, and invited you to mistake it for a
harmless studio--was merely a sheath, so to speak. Within, a corridor
divided it from the true wall of the room: and this room had no window
or top-light, though a handsome one in the roof--a dummy--beguiled the
eyes of its neighbours.

There was but one room: an apartment of really fine proportions, never
used by the tenants of the house, and known but to a few curious ones
among its frequenters.

The story went that the late owner, Earl C--, had reason to believe
himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends, and in
particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could hardly be accused to
his face. The Earl's sense of honour forbade him to accuse any meaner
man while the big culprit went unrebuked. Therefore he continued to
lose magnificently while he devised a new room for play: the room in
which I now followed Gervase.

I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and costly
thoroughness of the Earl's rebuke. I had imagined him conducting his
expectant guests to the door, ushering them in with a wave of the hand,
and taking his seat tranquilly amid the dead, embarrassed silence: had
imagined him facing the Royal Duke and asking, "Shall we cut?" with a
voice of the politest inflection.

For the room was a sheet of mirrors. Mirrors panelled the walls, the
doors, the very backs of the shutters. The tables had mirrors for tops:
the whole ceiling was one vast mirror. From it depended three great
candelabra of cut-glass, set with reflectors here, there, and
everywhere.

I had heard that even the floor was originally of polished brass.
If so, later owners must have ripped up the plates and sold them: for
now a few cheap Oriental rugs carpeted the unpolished boards. The place
was abominably dusty: the striped yellow curtains had lost half their
rings and drooped askew from their soiled vallances. Across one of the
wall-panels ran an ugly scar. A smell of rat pervaded the air.
The present occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to
games of chance, as they understood chance: and I doubt if a servant
entered it once a month. Gervas