I thought it was quite bad enough when all I had to bear was the gnawing anxiety over Million's disappearance, and the suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting for news of her! Living for the sound of the telephone bell ... sitting up here in her room, feeling as if three years had elapsed between each of my lonely hotel meals ... wondering, wondering over and over again what in the world became of her since I saw my young mistress at the Supper Club last night....
But now I've something worse to bear. Something far more appalling has happened!
I felt a presentiment that something horrible and unforeseen might occur, even before the first visit of the manager, with his suspicious glance, to Miss Million's room.
For I'd wandered downstairs, in my loneliness, to talk to the girl in the telephone exchange.
She's a bright-eyed, chatty creature who sits there all day under the big board with the lights that appear and disappear like glowworms twinkling on a lawn. She always seems to have a cup of tea and a plate of toast at her elbow.
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.)