Eliza, Lady Bellingham, once organised card parties in Clarges Street and, after becoming a widow, tries to gain a livelihood by opening a gambling den in St. James's Square on the other side of Piccadilly.

Deborah is adept at keeping her suitors at arm's length, but Adrian's mother, Selina, Lady Mablethorpe, is aghast at his wish to marry "a hussy out of a gaming house" and calls in her nephew, wealthy 35-year-old Max Ravenscar, to help free her son from this entanglement.

In order to shock the Mablethorpes even further, Deborah dresses up as a vulgar, tasteless flirt, but while she and Adrian are strolling in the grounds they come across the teenaged Phoebe Laxton weeping by herself in a summer house.

To counter the threat of prosecution, Deb arranges for Lucius and Silas to kidnap Ravenscar and hold him prisoner in their cellar until he agrees to relinquish the documents.

When Adrian returns in a state of elation, Ravenscar misunderstands the cause of his mood and goes round to denounce Deb to her face, only learning of his mistake later from Lady Mablethorpe.

Nevertheless, she is fully aware that Lady Bellingham's gambling house is sailing away from the fashionable card-parties she used to host into morally dubious waters, now that games of speculation such as Faro and the E. O.

Such a fall in reputation down the social ladder is of a piece with Heyer's experimenting with a new kind of unaristocratic hero in Mr Ravenscar, commenting ruefully that "The schoolgirls won't like his being a Mere Commoner but I'm so fed-up with writing a lot of wash about improbable dukes and earls.