She also seems always to have five minutes for a chat. And she's taken a sort of fancy to me; already she's confided to me countless bits of information about the staff and the people who are staying or who have stayed in the hotel.
"The things I've seen since I've been working here would fill a book," she told me blithely, when I drifted in to find companionship in her little room.
"Really, I think that if I'd only got time to sit down and write everything I'd come across in the way of the strange stories, and the experiences, and the different types of queer customers that one has come in one's way, well! I'd make my fortune. Hall Caine couldn't be in it. Excuse me a minute." (This was a telephone interlude.)
"The people you'd never think had anything odd about them," pursued the telephone girl, "and that turn out to be the Absolute Limit!" (I wondered, uneasily, if she thought that my absent mistress, Miss Million, belonged to this particular type.)
So I went back to the subject next time I passed the telephone office. (This was after the manager had looked into my room with his kind inquiries after Miss Million.)
"And, really," I said. I can't think what made me, Beatrice Lovelace, feel as guilty as if I were a pickpocket myself. Perhaps it was because I had something to hide. Namely, the fact that I was a maid whose mistress had left the hotel without a hint as to her destination or the date of her return!
"That's a Scotland Yard man that's passing in the hall now," she added, dropping her voice. "No; not the one you're looking at," as I turned to glance at a very broad, light-grey back. "That's another of our American cousins. Just come. A friend of Mr. Isaac Rattenheimer; have you seen Mrs. Rattenheimer when she's going out in the evening? My dear! The woman blazes with jewels like a Strand shooting-gallery with lights. You really ought to have a look at her.
"Come down into the lounge to-night; pretend you've got some note or something for your Miss Million. She'll be coming back to-night, I suppose?" she said.
"Oh, she may not. It all depends," I said vaguely, but with a desperate cheerfulness.
I left the telephone girl to decide for herself what this mysterious thing might be that I had said "depended," and I drifted out again into the vestibule.